Multi-geometric collimation for high sensitivity brain SPECT
Certain neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease are diagnosed by imaging centrally located brain structures such as basal ganglia and striatum. High sensitivity imaging of these structures is essential for the early-stage diagnosis of the disorder. We simulated a multi-geometric collimator that combines a short-focal-length astigmatic half-cone-beam collimator, designed to efficiently image the bottom half of the brain and especially the centrally located brain structures, and a spatially-variable-focusing collimator, designed to image the rest of the brain without truncation. We demonstrate that a multi-geometric collimator may offer significant sensitivity increase in imaging of the centrally located brain structures compared to conventional general-purpose parallel-hole and fan-beam collimators. As a result, the noise is reduced in the reconstructed images and lesion visualization is improved. Multi-geometric collimation shows a strong potential for improved regional tomography of the brain and early-stage diagnosis of neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease. ©2009 IEEE.
