ADVANCED TECHNIQUE AND MULTI-W-SHAPED SLIT GAUGE FOR QUANTIFYING SPECT SPATIAL RESOLUTION OF GAMMA CAMERA SCAN DATA: AN ENHANCED STUDY

Abstract

The advanced technique comprising an enhanced multi-W-shaped gauge and Taguchi-based analytical program of gamma camera (GC) spatial resolution optimization was proposed and successfully applied to the routine diagnosis of nuclear examination. The indigenous gauge was revised from a V-shaped gauge for computer tomography (CT) scanning. The multi-W-shaped slit had a gradually narrowing gap between two adjacent V-slits; once the gap was beyond the GC recognizable limit, the acquired imaging blurred, and the discrimination between V-slits was lost. The five factors of GC data collecting were assigned as A (detector to target distance), B (total counts), C (zoom of ROI), D (matrix size), and E (energy width). Taguchi’s orthogonal array ([Formula: see text]) of factor combinations was adopted to arrange them into 18 groups. The reproducibility was ensured by the manual ranking of the acquired SPECT imaging quality by three seasoned radiology experts in three discrete periods. Next, Matlab and OriginPro software packages performed the SPECT analysis via the Poisson distribution program, identifying the peak center and FWHM of peaks of interest in SPECT imaging to quantify the spatial resolution and calculate the minimum detectable difference (MDD). The smallest MDD of 6.21[Formula: see text]mm revealed the optimal combination of factors for GC data collecting: A1 (DTD 5[Formula: see text]cm), B3 (TC 225), C3 (Zm 1.0), D1 (MS [Formula: see text]), and E2 (EW 10%). The conventional preset and group 7 (with the highest signal-to-noise ratio) had MDD values of 8.19[Formula: see text]mm and 7.62[Formula: see text]mm.