Recent Advances in SPECT Imaging

TLDR

SPECT has rapidly evolved in recent years, with advances in hardware components such as scintillators and semiconductor photon transducers, as well as in image‑processing algorithms, leading to new clinical and preclinical systems. These advances enable the creation of smaller, more compact SPECT systems that can be tailored to specific applications. Commercially available high‑count cardiac SPECT systems without conventional collimation, hybrid SPECT/CT, and advanced reconstruction algorithms now allow rapid acquisition with diagnostic quality, while sub‑millimeter small‑animal SPECT systems provide unique molecular imaging capabilities.

Abstract

SPECT is a rapidly changing field, and the past several years have produced new developments in both hardware technology and image-processing algorithms. At the component level there have been improvements in scintillators and photon transducers as well as a greater availability of semiconductor technology. These devices permit the fabrication of smaller and more compact systems that can be customized for particular applications. New clinical devices include high-count sensitivity cardiac SPECT systems that do not use conventional collimation and the introduction of diagnostic-quality hybrid SPECT/CT systems. While there has been steady progress with reconstruction algorithms, exciting new processing algorithms have become commercially available that promise to provide substantial reductions in SPECT acquisition time without sacrificing diagnostic quality. Preclinical small-animal SPECT systems have become a major focus in nuclear medicine. These systems have pushed the limits of SPECT into the submillimeter range, making them valuable molecular imaging tools capable of providing information unavailable from other modalities.