A channelized Hotelling observer study of lesion detection in SPECT MAP reconstruction using anatomical priors

In emission tomography, anatomical side information, in the form of organ and lesion boundaries, derived from intra-patient coregistered CT or MR scans can be incorporated into the reconstruction. Our interest is in exploring the efficacy of such side information for lesion detectability. To assess detectability we used the SNR of a channelized Hotelling observer and a signal-known exactly/background-known exactly detection task. In simulation studies, we incorporated anatomical side information into a SPECT MAP (maximum a posteriori) reconstruction by smoothing within but not across organ or lesion boundaries. A non-anatomical prior was applied by uniform smoothing across the entire image. We investigated whether the use of anatomical priors with organ boundaries alone or with perfect lesion boundaries alone would change lesion detectability relative to the case of a prior with no anatomical information. Furthermore, we investigated whether any such detectability changes for the organ-boundary case would be a function of the distance of the lesion to the organ boundary. We also investigated whether any detectability changes for the lesion-boundary case would be a function of the degree of proximity, i.e. a difference in the radius of the true functional lesion and the radius of the anatomical lesion boundary. Our results showed almost no detectability difference with versus without organ boundaries at any lesion-to-organ boundary distance. Our results also showed no difference in lesion detectability with and without lesion boundaries, and no variation of lesion detectability with degree of proximity.