New lectures on SPECT and PET-CT

SPECT

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PET CT

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SPECT resources

An invaluable resource for both SPECT and planar gamma cameras is the article Routine Quality Control of Clinical Nuclear Medicine Instrumentation: A Brief Review in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. It is written with an audience of technologists in mind.

Additional Homework

I put this at the bottom of the previous post, but you might have missed it.

Some of the material in my lecture is not in the book and won't be on the homework.  Here is an additional homework problem to ensure that you understand it:

A radiologist reading an image and searching for skin cancer learns that the patient has a family history of skin cancer. How do you think this will affect her interpretation of a lesion which may or may not be skin cancer? Describe how this knowledge could increase or decrease her sensivity and selectivity and why.  Show these changes in an R.O.C. graph.

See also the Wikipedia pages on Sensitivity and Specificity and Receiver Operating Characteristic (R.O.C.) Function.

Class notes for Gamma Camera Image Quality

Gamma Camera Image Quality

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Additional Homework:

A radiologist reading an image and searching for skin cancer learns that the patient has a family history of skin cancer.  Describe how this knowledge could increase or decrease her sensivity and selectivity and why.

Links for image quality in gamma cameras

• From the IAEA: Diagnostic Nuclear Medicine - Image Quality and Quality Control
• From Harvard: Physical Characteristics of Nuclear Medicine Images (more detail than IAEA, but still not too technical)
  

• A short course in image quality with applications to Nuclear Medicine (state of the art, but very technical)
• Wikipedia pages on MTF, PSF, Poisson statistics, shot noise, signal to noise ratio

Many of the terms that we use to describe image quality are quite general and can be used to describe the quality of any two-dimensional image, not just those from a gamma camera.  The online book The Joy of Visual Perception discusses many of these functions.  See especially the chapter on Point and Line spread functions and Modulation Transfer Functions and click through the links.  

Useful Nuclear Physics Links

Here are some links that I use to look stuff up.

Nudat 2 is a compendium of facts about every isotope including half-lives, decay radiation and decay pathways.

Physics.nist.gov maintains tables of stopping power, X-ray attenuation coefficients, photon cross sections, and many other useful constants.

The American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) maintains several reports that contain the field consensus on all sorts of useful stuff such as SPECT Quality Control and PET shielding requirements.

Class Notes for Gamma Cameras

Gamma Cameras

For a more in-depth look at Gamma Camera artifacts, please look at these slides from the AAPM.  Remember to write your questions in the comments below.

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Welcome to my class

I will be taking over the class for Dr. Goodman-Mumma. You may use this blog to ask me any questions about the material or the course, and I will respond.  Use Comments to ask any questions and check back for an answer.