Technical overview of brain SPECT imaging: improving acquisition and processing of data.

The purpose of this article is to give a basic understanding of imaging setup, postprocessing procedures, and anatomy for brain SPECT. After reading the article, the nuclear medicine professional should be able to describe the normal anatomy of the brain; the localization of radiopharmaceutical complexes within the brain; good techniques for image acquisition; and the concepts of filtered backprojection, smoothing filters, and attenuation correction in reconstruction.