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Yu Z, Rahman MA, Abbey CK, Siegel BA, Jha AK. Development and task-based evaluation of a scatter-window projection and deep learning-based transmission-less attenuation compensation method for myocardial perfusion SPECT. ARXIV 2023:arXiv:2303.00197v2. [PMID: 36911280 PMCID: PMC10002798] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/14/2023]
Abstract
Attenuation compensation (AC) is beneficial for visual interpretation tasks in single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI). However, traditional AC methods require the availability of a transmission scan, most often a CT scan. This approach has the disadvantages of increased radiation dose, increased scanner cost, and the possibility of inaccurate diagnosis in cases of misregistration between the SPECT and CT images. Further, many SPECT systems do not include a CT component. To address these issues, we developed a Scatter-window projection and deep Learning-based AC (SLAC) method to perform AC without a separate transmission scan. To investigate the clinical efficacy of this method, we then objectively evaluated the performance of this method on the clinical task of detecting perfusion defects on MPI in a retrospective study with anonymized clinical SPECT/CT stress MPI images. The proposed method was compared with CT-based AC (CTAC) and no-AC (NAC) methods. Our results showed that the SLAC method yielded an almost overlapping receiver operating characteristic (ROC) plot and a similar area under the ROC (AUC) to the CTAC method on this task. These results demonstrate the capability of the SLAC method for transmission-less AC in SPECT and motivate further clinical evaluation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zitong Yu
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
| | - Md Ashequr Rahman
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
| | - Craig K. Abbey
- Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, USA
| | - Barry A. Siegel
- Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
| | - Abhinav K. Jha
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
- Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
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Yu Z, Rahman MA, Abbey CK, Siegel BA, Jha AK. Development and task-based evaluation of a scatter-window projection and deep learning-based transmission-less attenuation compensation method for myocardial perfusion SPECT. PROCEEDINGS OF SPIE--THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR OPTICAL ENGINEERING 2023; 12463:124631E. [PMID: 37274423 PMCID: PMC10238080 DOI: 10.1117/12.2654500] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/06/2023]
Abstract
Attenuation compensation (AC) is beneficial for visual interpretation tasks in single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI). However, traditional AC methods require the availability of a transmission scan, most often a CT scan. This approach has the disadvantage of increased radiation dose, increased scanner costs, and the possibility of inaccurate diagnosis in cases of misregistration between the SPECT and CT images. Further, many SPECT systems do not include a CT component. To address these issues, we developed a Scatter-window projection and deep Learning-based AC (SLAC) method to perform AC without a separate transmission scan. To investigate the clinical efficacy of this method, we then objectively evaluated the performance of this method on the clinical task of detecting perfusion defects on MPI in a retrospective study with anonymized clinical SPECT/CT stress MPI images. The proposed method was compared with CT-based AC (CTAC) and no-AC (NAC) methods. Our results showed that the SLAC method yielded an almost overlapping receiver operating characteristic (ROC) plot and a similar area under the ROC (AUC) to the CTAC method on this task. These results demonstrate the capability of the SLAC method for transmission-less AC in SPECT and motivate further clinical evaluation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zitong Yu
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
| | - Md Ashequr Rahman
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
| | - Craig K. Abbey
- Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, USA
| | - Barry A. Siegel
- Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
| | - Abhinav K. Jha
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
- Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
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Benabdallah N, Scheve W, Dunn N, Silvestros D, Schelker P, Abou D, Jammalamadaka U, Laforest R, Li Z, Liu J, Ballard DH, Maughan NM, Gay H, Baumann BC, Hobbs RF, Rogers B, Iravani A, Jha AK, Dehdashti F, Thorek DLJ. Practical considerations for quantitative clinical SPECT/CT imaging of alpha particle emitting radioisotopes. Theranostics 2021; 11:9721-9737. [PMID: 34815780 PMCID: PMC8581409 DOI: 10.7150/thno.63860] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/14/2021] [Accepted: 09/15/2021] [Indexed: 02/05/2023] Open
Abstract
Rationale: Alpha particle emitting radiopharmaceuticals are generating considerable interest for the treatment of disseminated metastatic disease. Molecular imaging of the distribution of these agents is critical to safely and effectively maximize the clinical potential of this emerging drug class. The present studies aim to investigate the feasibility and limitations of quantitative SPECT for 223Ra, 225Ac and 227Th. Methods: Three state-of-the-art SPECT/CT systems were investigated: the GE Discovery NM/CT 670, the GE Optima NM/CT 640, and the Siemens Symbia T6. A series of phantoms, including the NEMA IEC Body phantom, were used to compare and calibrate each camera. Additionally, anthropomorphic physical tumor and vertebrae phantoms were developed and imaged to evaluate the quantitative imaging protocol. Results: This work describes and validates a methodology to calibrate each clinical system. The efficiency of each gamma camera was analyzed and compared. Using the calibration factors obtained with the NEMA phantom, we were able to quantify the activity in 3D-printed tissue phantoms with an error of 2.1%, 3.5% and 11.8% for 223Ra, 225Ac, and 227Th, respectively. Conclusion: The present study validates that quantitative SPECT/CT imaging of 223Ra, 225Ac, and 227Th is achievable but that careful considerations for camera configuration are required. These results will aid in future implementation of SPECT-based patient studies and will help to identify the limiting factors for accurate image-based quantification with alpha particle emitting radionuclides.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nadia Benabdallah
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
- Program in Quantitative Molecular Therapeutics, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | | | | | | | | | - Diane Abou
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
- Program in Quantitative Molecular Therapeutics, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Uday Jammalamadaka
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Richard Laforest
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Zekun Li
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Jonathan Liu
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - David H. Ballard
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Nichole M. Maughan
- Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Hiram Gay
- Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Brian C. Baumann
- Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Robert F. Hobbs
- Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland
| | - Buck Rogers
- Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Amir Iravani
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Abhinav K. Jha
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
- Oncologic Imaging Program, Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Farrokh Dehdashti
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
- Oncologic Imaging Program, Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
| | - Daniel L. J. Thorek
- Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
- Program in Quantitative Molecular Therapeutics, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
- Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
- Oncologic Imaging Program, Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
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Clarkson E, Kupinski M. Effect on null spaces of list-mode imaging systems due to increasing the size of attribute space. JOURNAL OF THE OPTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA. A, OPTICS, IMAGE SCIENCE, AND VISION 2021; 38:387-394. [PMID: 33690468 PMCID: PMC8101067 DOI: 10.1364/josaa.403016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/20/2020] [Accepted: 01/18/2021] [Indexed: 06/12/2023]
Abstract
An upper bound is derived for a figure of merit that quantifies the error in reconstructed pixel or voxel values induced by the presence of null functions for any list-mode system. It is shown that this upper bound decreases as the region in attribute space occupied by the allowable attribute vectors expands. This upper bound allows quantification of the reduction in this error when this type of expansion is implemented. Of course, reconstruction error is also caused by system noise in the data, which has to be treated statistically, but we will not be addressing that problem here. This method is not restricted to pixelized or voxelized reconstructions and can in fact be applied to any region of interest. The upper bound for pixelized reconstructions is demonstrated on a list-mode 2D Radon transform example. The expansion in the attribute space is implemented by doubling the number of views. The results show how the pixel size and number of views both affect the upper bound on reconstruction error from null functions. This reconstruction error can be averaged over all pixels to give a single number or can be plotted as a function on the pixel grid. Both approaches are demonstrated for the example system. In conclusion, this method can be applied to any list-mode system for which the system operator is known and could be used in the design of the systems and reconstruction algorithms.
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Affiliation(s)
- Eric Clarkson
- Department of Medical Imaging, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA
| | - Meredith Kupinski
- College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA
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Rahman MA, Jha AK. Task-based assessment of binned and list-mode SPECT systems. PROCEEDINGS OF SPIE--THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR OPTICAL ENGINEERING 2021; 11599:1159904. [PMID: 34345113 PMCID: PMC8325874 DOI: 10.1117/12.2582266] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/02/2023]
Abstract
In SPECT, list-mode (LM) format allows storing data at higher precision compared to binned data. There is significant interest in investigating whether this higher precision translates to improved performance on clinical tasks. Towards this goal, in this study, we quantitatively investigated whether processing data in LM format, and in particular, the energy attribute of the detected photon, provides improved performance on the task of absolute quantification of region-of-interest (ROI) uptake in comparison to processing the data in binned format. We conducted this evaluation study using a DaTscan brain SPECT acquisition protocol, conducted in the context of imaging patients with Parkinson's disease. This study was conducted with a synthetic phantom. A signal-known exactly/background-known-statistically (SKE/BKS) setup was considered. An ordered-subset expectation-maximization algorithm was used to reconstruct images from data acquired in LM format, including the scatter-window data, and including the energy attribute of each LM event. Using a realistic 2-D SPECT system simulation, quantification tasks were performed on the reconstructed images. The results demonstrated improved quantification performance when LM data was used compared to binning the attributes in all the conducted evaluation studies. Overall, we observed that LM data, including the energy attribute, yielded improved performance on absolute quantification tasks compared to binned data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Md Ashequr Rahman
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
- Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
| | - Abhinav K. Jha
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
- Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
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Rahman A, Zhu Y, Clarkson E, Kupinski MA, Frey EC, Jha AK. Fisher information analysis of list-mode SPECT emission data for joint estimation of activity and attenuation distribution. INVERSE PROBLEMS 2020; 36:084002. [PMID: 33071423 PMCID: PMC7561050 DOI: 10.1088/1361-6420/ab958b] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/20/2023]
Abstract
The potential to perform attenuation and scatter compensation (ASC) in single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging without a separate transmission scan is highly significant. In this context, attenuation in SPECT is primarily due to Compton scattering, where the probability of Compton scatter is proportional to the attenuation coefficient of the tissue and the energy of the scattered photon and the scattering angle are related. Based on this premise, we investigated whether the SPECT scattered-photon data acquired in list-mode (LM) format and including the energy information can be used to estimate the attenuation map. For this purpose, we propose a Fisher-information-based method that yields the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for the task of jointly estimating the activity and attenuation distribution using only the SPECT emission data. In the process, a path-based formalism to process the LM SPECT emission data, including the scattered-photon data, is proposed. The Fisher information method was implemented on NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPU) for acceleration. The method was applied to analyze the information content of SPECT LM emission data, which contains up to first-order scattered events, in a simulated SPECT system with parameters modeling a clinical system using realistic computational studies with 2-D digital synthetic and anthropomorphic phantoms. The method was also applied to LM data containing up to second-order scatter for a synthetic phantom. Experiments with anthropomorphic phantoms simulated myocardial perfusion and dopamine transporter (DaT)-Scan SPECT studies. The results show that the CRB obtained for the attenuation and activity coefficients was typically much lower than the true value of these coefficients. An increase in the number of detected photons yielded lower CRB for both the attenuation and activity coefficients. Further, we observed that systems with better energy resolution yielded a lower CRB for the attenuation coefficient. Overall, the results provide evidence that LM SPECT emission data, including the scattered photons, contains information to jointly estimate the activity and attenuation coefficients.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ashequr Rahman
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
- Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
| | - Yansong Zhu
- Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
- Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Canada
| | - Eric Clarkson
- College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ, USA
| | | | - Eric C Frey
- Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
| | - Abhinav K Jha
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
- Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
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