Multi-divergent-beam stationary cardiac SPECT.

Multi-pinhole SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) is widely used in small animal imaging. Recently multi-pinhole SPECT has been applied to human cardiac imaging, and it has been shown that if three SPECT cameras are used, the multi-pinhole system can be stationary. A stationary cardiac SPECT system forces the pinholes to operate at image reduction mode, where the object must be positioned away from the pinholes. With this imaging reduction mode setup, the divergent-beam collimator provides better sensitivity than the pinhole collimator when they have the same image reduction factor and the same spatial resolution. This paper suggests for a stationary cardiac SPECT system to use the multi-divergent-hole collimators instead of the multi-pinhole collimators.