Collimator Interchange System for Adaptive Cardiac Imaging in C-SPECT

Compared to imaging the heart with conventional cameras, dedicated cardiac SPECT systems can achieve much higher performance through use of a small field of view. To realize this potential, however, the heart must be reliably placed in the appropriate small FOV prior to imaging, thus requiring a separate scout operation to locate the heart and estimate its size. Further-more, to achieve high performance across the general population, a system should provide several imaging configurations optimized for different size and location of the heart and the size of the patient. Because of the critical role the collimator plays in SPECT, it would be ideal if a dedicated collimator could be used for each of the different patient groups, as well as for the scout imaging. The ability to exchange collimators without moving the patient can also enable serial studies with different imaging options while preserving anatomic registration. We developed a slit exchange system for the slit-slat collimator of the C-SPECT cardiac platform. The full-scale prototype, a precision link conveyor following a curved, body contouring path, allows four distinct transaxial collimation options. The collimators can be exchanged in 10 seconds without disturbing the patient, thus allowing adaptive clinical SPECT imaging. The positioning precision for all elements of the system is within 0.1 mm and has shown no degradation over 100,000 complete revolutions of the conveyor-twice the expected usage for a clinical system. We consider the rapid and precise operation allowing optimal collimation for different imaging tasks to be an important technological step for cardiac SPECT.