An evaluation of lesion detectability with cone-beam, fanbeam and parallel-beam collimation in SPECT by continuous...

To evaluate lesion detectability for clinical evaluation of cone-beam (CB), fanbeam (FB) and parallel-beam (PB) collimator sensitivity, experimentally acquired phantom data were used to assess the advantage of CB collimation over conventional collimation.

Lesion detectability with CB, FB and PB collimation in SPECT was compared using a three-dimensional brain phantom and continuous receiver operating characteristic (CROC) analysis. A simulated cold lesion was located near the posterior portion of the thalamus. High count density scans of this phantom were acquired with CB, FB and PB collimators with similar resolution. These projections were scaled to count levels which reflected the measured sensitivities of the three collimators. Computer-generated Poisson noise was added to the projections to produce uncorrelated data sets. Images were reconstructed using a filtered backprojection algorithm. All reconstructions used a Hann filter with multiplicative attenuation correction. Each of seven trained observers viewed 288 sets of images and indicated the certainty of perceiving a cold lesion at a specified location by a rating of 0-100. Each image set contained four adjacent slices centered on the lesion to minimize partial volume effects. The program LABROC4 was used to fit CROC curves to individual observers' ratings. A t-test for paired data was performed on the individual areas.

The average areas (standard deviations) under CROC curves for CB, FB and PB were 0.89 (0.03), 0.83 (0.05) and 0.76 (0.04), respectively. The differences of the areas were statistically significant with all two-tailed p values < 0.02.

These results demonstrate that cold lesions in the posterior portion of the thalamus are best detected by images obtained using CB followed by FB and PB collimation.