Adaptive regularization using B-splines for gated dynamic cardiac spect

Recently we proposed a joint reconstruction approach for dynamic cardiac images from a gated acquisition in single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), where the time evolution at each image pixel is regulated by a B-spline function. Such an approach was demonstrated to be very effective for coping with the greatly underdetermined nature of the problem. In this work we further develop this approach by investigating the use of an adaptive smoothing prior on the spline control points based on their contribution to the acquired data counts. The proposed approach is evaluated using a dynamic version of the 4D gated mathematical cardiac-torso (gMCAT) phantom to simulate a gated SPECT perfusion acquisition with Tc-99m Teboroxime. Our results demonstrate that the use of the newly introduced prior can improve the accuracy of the reconstruction.