Funds are requested through the Shared Instrumentation Program of the BRSG to promote further developments in our research focused on single photons emission computed tomographic (SPECT) imaging. To continue our past success in our research and promote its application in a clinical setting, it is vital that we obtain a state-of-the-art SPECT system. Such a system would be used to support the NIH funded research of a group of eight investigators, primarily within the Department of Nuclear Medicine. It would serve as a focal point about which the expertise of investigators from different disciplines would interact to enhance the progress and clinical relevance of our research, provide needed additional SPECT acquisition and """"""""number-crunching"""""""" capabilities, and allow the extension of NIH funded research into investigations which are currently unable to perform due to equipment limitations. At the present time, we have a single, eight year old SPECT system with a single, circular camera head or acquiring clinical and research SPECT studies within our department. This system is becoming increasingly busy clinically with SPECT and planar imaging. At the same time, the number of NIH funded projects which require SPECT and planar acquisition time and """"""""number crunching"""""""" power has increased and the progress of this research is being slowed accordingly. The new system we propose to purchase is the prism SPECT system of Picker International. This system has three rectangular camera heads which surround the patient with three times greater detector area resulting in increased sensitivity. Sensitivity of this system is further increased by providing continuous acquisition of data during camera rotation. This is vitally important for rapid imaging as desired for our cardiac applications. The system also comes with a 32 MFLOPS (million floating point operations per second) supercomputer which reduces computation time and, therefore, significantly enhances the resource for our """"""""number crunching"""""""" intensive research.
