Master Thesis: Development and Evaluation of A Freehand SPECT Scanning Simulator

Thesis by: Negin Zarnegar
Advisor: Prof. Nassir Navab
Supervision by: Dr. Tobias Lasser

Motivation

Freehand SPECT is a novel imaging method belonging to nuclear medical imaging category. Contrary to its former kinds, freehand SPECT is not bound to a bulky gantry of sensors, instead benefits from a tracked gamma handheld probe. Although This feature provides tremendous flexibility, poses certain challenges as well. Among them, inapplicability of optimized acquisition and reconstruction techniques could be address. According to its certain specifications, those techniques tailored for freehand SPECT needed to be established.

When it comes to verification and validation of SPECT imaging setups even for those which benefit from mathematically well defined position of sensors, due to intrinsic uncertainty of radioactive decay, a computer simulator is of high demand; both due to reliability on results and financial advantages. In freehand SPECT this uncertainty is twofold: that of radioactive decay and of acquisition geometry, which strongly demand a tailored computer simulator. This simulator should address the flexibility degree in acquisition geometry of a freehand movement which is not the case in available computer simulators.

In this work, in order for conducting a wide variety of studies such as scanning protocols for certain clinical cases or comparison of different gamma probes on reconstruction in identical cases, we are developing a computer simulator for scanning in freehand SPECT. This work is under supervision of Prof. Nassir Navab, Dr. Tobias Lasser and Dr. Thomas Wendler and is sponsored by SurgicEye GmbH and chair of computer aided medical procedures in TUM.

Resources

• Simulator has been developed based on declipseSPECT, a freehand SPECT product of SurgicEye GmbH.
• For experimental tests, phantom radioactive volumes and their images got provided in IFL lab.