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Deep learning-based attenuation map generation for myocardial perfusion SPECT

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European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Attenuation correction using CT transmission scanning increases the accuracy of single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and enables quantitative analysis. Current existing SPECT-only systems normally do not support transmission scanning and therefore scans on these systems are susceptible to attenuation artifacts. Moreover, the use of CT scans also increases radiation dose to patients and significant artifacts can occur due to the misregistration between the SPECT and CT scans as a result of patient motion. The purpose of this study is to develop an approach to estimate attenuation maps directly from SPECT emission data using deep learning methods.

Methods

Both photopeak window and scatter window SPECT images were used as inputs to better utilize the underlying attenuation information embedded in the emission data. The CT-based attenuation maps were used as labels with which cardiac SPECT/CT images of 65 patients were included for training and testing. We implemented and evaluated deep fully convolutional neural networks using both standard training and training using an adversarial strategy.

Results

The synthetic attenuation maps were qualitatively and quantitatively consistent with the CT-based attenuation map. The globally normalized mean absolute error (NMAE) between the synthetic and CT-based attenuation maps were 3.60% ± 0.85% among the 25 testing subjects. The SPECT reconstructed images corrected using the CT-based attenuation map and synthetic attenuation map are highly consistent. The NMAE between the reconstructed SPECT images that were corrected using the synthetic and CT-based attenuation maps was 0.26% ± 0.15%, whereas the localized absolute percentage error was 1.33% ± 3.80% in the left ventricle (LV) myocardium and 1.07% ± 2.58% in the LV blood pool.

Conclusion

We developed a deep convolutional neural network to estimate attenuation maps for SPECT directly from the emission data. The proposed method is capable of generating highly reliable attenuation maps to facilitate attenuation correction for SPECT-only scanners for myocardial perfusion imaging.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by American Heart Association award 18PRE33990138 and National Institute of Health grant R01HL123949. We would like to thank Dr. Eric Frey from Johns Hopkins University for the image reconstruction tool and Dr. Stephanie Thorn from Yale University and Christopher Weyman from Yale New Haven Hospital for helpful discussions. We would also like to thank Drs. Edward J. Miller and Albert J. Sinusas from Yale University for their help with data acquisition and results interpretation.

Funding

This study was supported by American Heart Association award 18PRE33990138 and National Institute of Health grant R01HL123949.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Luyao Shi & Chi Liu

  2. Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    John A. Onofrey, Hui Liu & Chi Liu

  3. Department of Urology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    John A. Onofrey

  4. Department of Internal Medicine (Cardiology), Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Hui Liu & Yi-Hwa Liu

  5. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taoyuan, Taiwan

    Yi-Hwa Liu

Authors
  1. Luyao Shi
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  2. John A. Onofrey
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  3. Hui Liu
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  4. Yi-Hwa Liu
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  5. Chi Liu
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Conception and design of the study: Luyao Shi and Chi Liu; algorithm implementation: Luyao Shi and John A. Onofrey; data acquisition: Luyao Shi and Chi Liu; data analysis: Luyao Shi, Hui Liu, and Yi-Hwa Liu; writing of the first draft of the manuscript: Luyao Shi. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chi Liu.

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Conflict of interest

Chi Liu, Luyao Shi, and John Onofrey are named inventors on a provisional patent application that Yale University has filed on this work. No other potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article exist.

Ethical approval retrospective studies

The retrospective use of the anonymized data in this study was approved by Yale Institutional Review Board under protocol number 2000026790.

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Shi, L., Onofrey, J.A., Liu, H. et al. Deep learning-based attenuation map generation for myocardial perfusion SPECT. Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging 47, 2383–2395 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-020-04746-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-020-04746-6

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