| ingle-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is affected by photon attenuation and image blurring due to Compton scatter and geometric detector response. Attenuation correction is important to increase diagnostic accuracy of cardiac SPECT. However, in attenuation-corrected scans, scattered photons from radioactivity in the liver could produce a spillover of counts into the inferior myocardial wall. In the clinical setting, blurring effects could be compensated by restoration with Wiener and Metz filters. Inconveniences of these procedures are that the Wiener filter depends upon the power spectra of the object image and noise, which are unknown, while Metz parameters have to be optimized by trial and error.;This research develops an alternative restoration procedure based on a multiresolution denoising and regularization algorithm. It was hypothesized that this representation leads to a more straightforward and automatic restoration than conventional filters. The main objective of the research was the development and assessment of the multiresolution algorithm for compensating the liver spillover artifact.;The multiresolution algorithm decomposes original SPECT projections into a set of sub-band frequency images. This allows a simple denoising and regularization procedure by discarding high frequency channels and performing inversion only in low and intermediate frequencies. The method was assessed in bull's eye polar maps and short-axis attenuation-corrected reconstructions of a realistic cardiac-chest phantom with a custom-made liver insert and different... |
