Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography plays an important and well- validated role in the diagnosis and staging of a number of important cardiac diseases, and is widely used and available at many clinical sites in the US and around the world. The most common application has been myocardial perfusion SPECT to evaluate cardiovascular disease. A new and potentially important application is I-123 MIBG SPECT (AdreView) for myocardial innervation imaging. While there has been a great deal of work to develop improved reconstruction methods, and some work to develop optimized instrumentation and acquisition parameters, these have been done largely in isolation of each other. Questions such as: what is the optimal collimator when using collimator response compensation? what is the optimal energy window with scatter compensation?, is it optimal to use the same acquisition time for each projection view?, and is it optimal to use the same acquisition time per patient? have never been addressed. In addition, there are currently a number of dedicated scanners for cardiac imaging that incorporate several novel features to decrease acquisition time. Some of these are based on cadmium zinc telluride semiconductor detectors that provide improved full-width at half maximum energy resolution, but have a more complicated energy response that includes tails extending to low-energies. Other new detector materials such as LaBr with improved energy resolutions are on the horizon. However, energy windows and scatter compensation methods for CZT and LaBr detectors have not been optimized, nor has their benefit on cardiac imaging been rigorously tested. In this grant we propose to use novel, state-of-the art task-based image quality measures and realistic well-validated simulations calibrated by clinical studies to perform comprehensive end-to-end optimization of instrumentation, acquisition, reconstruction, and compensation parameters and methods. We will investigate the tradeoff between these factors and acquisition time/injected dose, allowing physicians to trade image quality for reduced radiation dose. The results would have an immediate impact in providing improved image quality, diagnostic accuracy, and reduced patient dose, while also having a longer term impact by guiding the development of future SPECT systems. The work will also provide validation of novel optimization strategies using projection-domain ideal-observers that handle mismatch between the imaging model used in the reconstruction and the true imaging process.

Public Health Relevance

This project proposes to perform a comprehensive optimization of cardiac SPECT instrumentation, acquisition, compensation and reconstruction parameters using state-of-the-art task-based image quality measures. The results will result in improved performance with current hardware and also guide the development of improved SPECT systems and software in the future to provide improved diagnosis of heart disease, cancer staging, and brain diseases.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01EB016231-02
Application #
8595309
Study Section
Biomedical Imaging Technology Study Section (BMIT)
Program Officer
Sastre, Antonio
Project Start
2013-01-01
Project End
2016-12-31
Budget Start
2014-01-01
Budget End
2014-12-31
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2014
Total Cost
$319,302
Indirect Cost
$116,802
Name
Johns Hopkins University
Department
Radiation-Diagnostic/Oncology
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
001910777
City
Baltimore
State
MD
Country
United States
Zip Code
21218
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Li, Xin; Jha, Abhinav K; Ghaly, Michael et al. (2017) Use of Sub-Ensembles and Multi-Template Observers to Evaluate Detection Task Performance for Data That are Not Multivariate Normal. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 36:917-929
Mena, Esther; Taghipour, Mehdi; Sheikhbahaei, Sara et al. (2017) Value of Intratumoral Metabolic Heterogeneity and Quantitative 18F-FDG PET/CT Parameters to Predict Prognosis in Patients With HPV-Positive Primary Oropharyngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma. Clin Nucl Med 42:e227-e234
Jha, Abhinav K; Frey, Eric (2017) No-gold-standard evaluation of image-acquisition methods using patient data. Proc SPIE Int Soc Opt Eng 10136:
Elshahaby, Fatma E A; Jha, Abhinav K; Ghaly, Michael et al. (2017) A comparison of resampling schemes for estimating model observer performance with small ensembles. Phys Med Biol 62:7300-7320
Mena, Esther; Sheikhbahaei, Sara; Taghipour, Mehdi et al. (2017) 18F-FDG PET/CT Metabolic Tumor Volume and Intratumoral Heterogeneity in Pancreatic Adenocarcinomas: Impact of Dual-Time Point and Segmentation Methods. Clin Nucl Med 42:e16-e21
Jha, Abhinav K; Caffo, Brian; Frey, Eric C (2016) A no-gold-standard technique for objective assessment of quantitative nuclear-medicine imaging methods. Phys Med Biol 61:2780-800
Ghaly, Michael; Du, Yong; Links, Jonathan M et al. (2016) Collimator optimization in myocardial perfusion SPECT using the ideal observer and realistic background variability for lesion detection and joint detection and localization tasks. Phys Med Biol 61:2048-66
Ghaly, Michael; Links, Jonathan M; Frey, Eric C (2016) Collimator optimization and collimator-detector response compensation in myocardial perfusion SPECT using the ideal observer with and without model mismatch and an anthropomorphic model observer. Phys Med Biol 61:2109-23
Elshahaby, Fatma E A; Ghaly, Michael; Jha, Abhinav K et al. (2016) Factors affecting the normality of channel outputs of channelized model observers: an investigation using realistic myocardial perfusion SPECT images. J Med Imaging (Bellingham) 3:015503

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