ART3H reconstruction of 7-pinhole tomographic myocardial perfusion imaging in the evaluation of coronary angioplasty

Seven-pinhole tomography is considered a rather complicated imaging technique for getting three-dimensional morphological information of the myocardium. The authors overcame the technical shortcomings of past systems by optimizing the reconstruction software and parameters. ART3, a fast version of the ART (algebraic reconstruction technique) algorithm, can cope with data which are corrupted with a high level of noise and uses comparatively little computer storage space. ART3 was extended with a recently developed postreconstruction operator called Fizevo (find zero voxels) to obtain a modified algorithm was named ART3H. Fizevo can be considered as a shadow elimination technique. The modified system was evaluated for a group of 61 patients which underwent an elective coronary angioplasty. A diagnostic accuracy of 81% was achieved. This modified version of seven pinhole tomoscintigraphy appears to be equivalent to other tomographic methods.<<ETX>>