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 approximately 40 min, thus making routine use of these three-dimensional images clinically feasible.