An accurate and efficient system model of iterative image reconstruction in high-resolution pinhole SPECT for small animal research

Accurate modeling of the photon acquisition process in pinhole SPECT is essential for optimizing resolution. In this work, the authors develop an accurate system model in which pinhole finite aperture and depth-dependent geometric sensitivity are explicitly included. To achieve high-resolution pinhole SPECT, the voxel size is usually set in the range of sub-millimeter so that the total number of image voxels increase accordingly. It is inevitably that a system matrix that models a variety of favorable physical factors will become extremely sophisticated. An efficient implementation for such an accurate system model is proposed in this research. We first use the geometric symmetries to reduce redundant entries in the matrix. Due to the sparseness of the matrix, only non-zero terms are stored. A novel center-to-radius recording rule is also developed to effectively describe the relation between a voxel and its related detectors at every projection angle. The proposed system matrix is also suitable for multi-threaded computing. Finally, the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed system model is evaluated in a workstation equipped with two Quad-Core Intel X eon processors.