Effects of filtration on right ventricular function by the gated blood pool SPECT.

Objective: Gated blood po ol single photon emission computed tomography (GBPS) offers the possibility of obtaining additional functional information from blood pool studies, including evaluation of left and right ventricular function simultaneously. The calculation of ventricular volumes based on the identification of the endocardial surface would be influenced by the spatial resolution in the reconstructed images. This study was performed to evaluate the effect of different filters on the right ventricular function.

Methods: The normal four-dimensional (4-D) NURBS-based cardiac-torso (NCAT) phantom with known right ventricular volume and ejection fraction was generated. The SIMIND Monte Carlo program was used to create projections. The studies were reconstructed by FBP and post-processing filtration such as Butterworth, Hanning, Shepp-Logan, Metz and Wiener in different statuses (cutoff and order). Using the Cedars-Sinai QBS (quantitative blood pool SPECT) package, the ventricular functional parameters were computed. The calculated values were analyzed and compared with the normal NCAT results.

Results: The results implied that the calculated right ventricular end diastolic volume (RVEDV) by Butterworth filtration (cutoff frequency = 0.3) agreed more with the NCAT Phantom characteristics [relative difference percentage (RDP) = 1.2 %], while the maximum accordance in the calculation of the RV ejection fraction (EF) (RDP = 3 %) was observed by Metz filter (FWHM 20 pixel). Also, the results of this study demonstrate that the Butterworth filter provided the most stable values (cutoff frequency = 0.4-0.5) in the estimation of RVEDV (RDP = 7.5 %). The Hanning and Shepp-Logan filters produced a much larger RDP, particularly in low frequency (41.1 and 21.5 %, respectively) compared to other filters.

Conclusions: This study demonstrated that the operation of different filters has a severe effect in computing right ventricular volume. The resolution recovery and Butterworth filters tend to give more comparable ventricular volumes with the actual normal NCAT value. Further evaluation using a large clinical database is underway to evaluate the optimum protocol in a clinical setting.