A Preliminary Quantification of 99mTc-HMPAO Brain SPECT Images for Assessment of Volumetric Regional Cerebral Blood Flow

The quantitative methods for the assessment of the cerebral blood flow using 99mTc- HMPAO brain SPECT utilize the measured count distribution in some specific reconstructed tomographic slice or in algebraic summation of a few neighboring slices, rather than the true volumetric distribution, to estimate the relative regional cerebral blood flow, and consequently produce the biased estimates of the true regional cerebral blood flow. This kind of biases are thought to originate mainly from the arbitrarily irregular shape of the cerebral region of interest(ROI) which are analyzed. In this study, a semi-automated method for the direct quantification of the volumetric regional cerebral blood flow estimate is proposed, and the results are compared to those calculated by the previous planar approaches. Bias factors due to the partial volume effect and the uncertainty in ROI determination are not considered presently for the methodological comparison of planar/volumetric assessment protocol.