New Collimation Techniques Improve Brain Imaging

The researchers designed a SPECT collimator pair to be used on dual head systems to increase sensitivity, particularly in the center of the brain, while maintaining spatial resolution. They then compared the collimator pairs to conventional systems on the basis of performance in estimating activity concentration of small structures at various locations in the brain. The results showed that the best collimator pair was a cone-beam collimator with a 20 cm focal length and a fan-beam collimator with a 40 cm focal length.

"Combining fan-beam and short-focusing cone-beam collimation should greatly improve dual-head SPECT images, especially when imaging structures located centrally in the brain, such as striata,” concluded Dr. Mi-Ae Park and colleagues from the radiology department at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA, USA). Their work was reported at the annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine in New Orleans (LA, USA).




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