Three-dimensional display of gated cardiac blood-pool studies

There has been little interest in use of single photon tomography in gated cardiac blood-pool imaging. This fact arises most likely from two principal causes: the difficulty associated with interpretation of images presented as series of beating slices, and the formidable computational burdens involved in processing the data. We have addressed both of these issues. A new method, called volume rendering, is used to generate realistic and easily interpreted three-dimensional images of the cardiac blood pool. These images of the beating heart can be displayed in a continuously rotating cine format or viewed in any orientation selected by the observer. Total computation time for a 16-frame gated study, including filtered backprojection, spatial and temporal filtering, and volume rendering, is 82.7 min employing a 32-bit computer and an array processor. With greater use of the array processor it should be possible to reduce the time to ~40 min, thus making routine use of these three-dimensional images clinically feasible.