Improved Accuracy with Reduced Radiation Dose for SPECT MPI

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) is responsible for an unacceptable death rate, compromised life quality and economic burden to the US healthcare system. SPECT MPI is widely utilized for diagnosing, management and predicting outcomesof patients with CAD. Recent studies applying attenuation and spatial resolution correction (ACR) to SPECT have significantly improved these clinical measures over conventional rest-stress protocols and 'stress-only' protocols; the latter having significantly lower patient radiation dose. However, these new methods are applied to less than 10% of patient studies due to transmission imaging hardware and source costs on new systems, and poor incentive for manufacturers to develop solutions for the installedSPECT base. The long-term objective of this research is to develop and commercialize a clinically-validated low-cost software-only ACR solution with significantly lower radiation dose for the un-served SPECT market and the population at-large. The methods