3193 Physics in Medicine & Biology Estimation of dynamic time activity curves from dynamic cardiac SPECT imaging J Hossain 1 , Y Du 1 , J Links 2 , A Rahmim 3 , N Karakatsanis 3 , A Akhbardeh 4 , J Lyons 5 and E C Frey 1 1 Division of Medical Imaging Physics, Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, MD 21287, USA 2 Division of Molecular and Translational Toxicology, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA 3 Division of Nuclear Medicine, Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, MD 21287, USA 4 MRI Research, Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, MD 21287, USA 5 Department of Neurology, Brigham and women’s hospital department of neurology and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA E-mail: jakirh2000@gmail.com Received 25 August 2014, revised 26 January 2015 Accepted for publication 25 February 2015 Published 26 March 2015 Abstract Whole-heart coronary low reserve (CFR) may be useful as an early predictor of cardiovascular disease or heart failure. Here we propose a simple method to extract the time-activity curve, an essential component needed for estimating the CFR, for a small number of compartments in the body, such as normal myocardium, blood pool, and ischemic myocardial regions, from SPECT data acquired with conventional cameras using slow rotation. We evaluated the method using a realistic simulation of 99m Tc-teboroxime imaging. Uptake of 99m Tc-teboroxime based on data from the literature were modeled. Data were simulated using the anatomically-realistic 3D NCAT phantom and an analytic projection code that realistically models attenuation, scatter, and the collimator-detector response. The proposed method was then applied to estimate time activity curves (TACs) for a set of 3D volumes of interest (VOIs) directly from the projections. We evaluated the accuracy and precision of estimated TACs and studied the effects of the presence of perfusion defects that were and were not modeled in the estimation procedure. The method produced good estimates of the myocardial and blood-pool TACS organ VOIs, with average weighted absolute biases of less than 5% for the myocardium and 10% for the blood pool when the true organ boundaries Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine 0031-9155/15/083193+16$33.00 © 2015 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine Printed in the UK Phys. Med. Biol. 60 (2015) 3193–3208 doi:10.1088/0031-9155/60/8/3193