Tl. Faber et al., 3-DIMENSIONAL DISPLAYS OF LEFT-VENTRICULAR EPICARDIAL SURFACE FROM STANDARD CARDIAC SPECT PERFUSION QUANTIFICATION TECHNIQUES, The Journal of nuclear medicine, 36(4), 1995, pp. 697-703
Two methods for generating left ventricular epicardial surface from SP
ECT perfusion tomograms are described and validated. Both methods use
the locations of the maximal reconstructed count values determined fro
m a perfusion quantification procedure as a basis for generating surfa
ces. Methods: The first method fits circular contours, which are perpe
ndicular to the long-axis, to the points obtained from perfusion quant
ification. The second method applies median and linear filters to the
points to remove noise but maintain the basic shape of the surface. Bo
th models are validated against an automatic technique and against the
user-traced surfaces of both the perfusion image and an MR image of t
he same patient. Results: The median-filtered model was found to be cl
oser to the standard surfaces than the circular model in all cases, an
d 85% of the points on the median-filtered surfaces were within one SP
ECT pixel length of the hand-traced MR surfaces. Conclusion: Accurate,
three-dimensional left ventricular epicardial surfaces can be generat
ed quickly and easily from already existing perfusion quantification s
oftware. The resulting images may be useful for realistic displays of
ventricular size, shape and the three-dimensional distribution of perf
usion.