Reconstruction of respiratory-binned cardiac spect using a robust smoothing prior
Cardiac images in single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are known to suffer from loss of resolution associated with respiratory motion. In this work, we investigate the use of a spatially adaptive smoothing prior in a motion-compensated reconstruction framework for SPECT, wherein respiratory binned data are incorporated into the reconstruction of the myocardium with respect to a reference respiratory bin. In the experiments, we evaluated this approach with both simulated imaging data and two sets of clinical acquisitions. The results show that the proposed approach can be effective for improving the heart wall in terms of both the noise level and spatial resolution. The proposed approach was also demonstrated to be robust when the imaging dose was reduced.