Assessment of the severity of partial volume effects and the performance of two template-based correction methods in...

We investigated the severity of partial volume effects (PVE), which may occur in SPECT/CT studies, and the performance of two template-based correction techniques. A hybrid SPECT/CT system was used to scan a thorax phantom that included lungs, a heart insert and six cylindrical containers of different sizes and activity concentrations. This phantom configuration allowed us to have non-uniform background activity and a combination of spill-in and spill-out effects for several compartments. The reconstruction with corrections for attenuation, scatter and resolution loss but not PVE correction accurately recovered absolute activities in large organs. However, the activities inside segmented 17-120 mL containers were underestimated by 20%-40%. After applying our PVE correction to the data pertaining to six small containers, the accuracy of the recovered total activity improved with errors ranging between 3% and 22% (non-iterative method) and between 5% and 15% (method with an iteratively updated background activity). While the non-iterative template-based algorithm demonstrated slightly better accuracy for cases with less severe PVE than the iterative algorithm, it underperformed in situations with considerable spill out and/or mixture of spill-in and spill-out effects.