4D reconstruction of cardiac SPECT using a robust spatialtemporal prior
Cardiac gated images in single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are known to suffer from increased noise due to low data counts. In this work, we investigate a 4D reconstruction approach based on an adaptive spatiotemporal smoothing prior, which is used to exploit the common signal component among the different cardiac gates in a sequence. In the experiments, we evaluated this approach with both simulated NCAT imaging data and two sets of clinical acquisitions. The results demonstrate that the proposed 4D approach can be more effective for improving the heart wall in terms of both noise levels and spatial resolution than motion-compensated 4D reconstruction. The proposed approach was also found to be robust for noise suppression when the imaging dose was reduced.