Three-dimensional presentation of the Fourier amplitude and phase: a fast display method for gated cardiac blood-pool SPECT

The routine clinical use of gated SPECT is inhibited by sophisticated, time-consuming processing techniques. The present paper describes a new technique for the simultaneous three-dimensional presentation of the amplitude and phase of the first Fourier harmonics, with the aim of obtaining detailed information about the ventricular motion in a relatively short time, from each angle of view of three-dimensional space. The method is simple and robust, and processing is automatic. It does not need carefully elaborated techniques for surface determination, because the cardiac surface is merely used as a reference skeleton onto which the functional information of amplitude and phase is mapped. The Fourier analysis before reconstruction results in running times shorter than 15 min and may further open the way for the routine use of gated SPECT.