Abstract
In recent years, there have been several findings regarding CT number variations (partial scan artifact or PSA) across time in dynamic myocardial perfusion studies with short scan gated reconstruction. These variations are correlated with the view angle range corresponding to the short scan acquisition for a given cardiac phase, which can vary from one cardiac cycle to another due to the asynchrony between heart rate and gantry rotation speed. In this study, we investigate several potential causes of PSA, including noise, beam hardening and scatter, using numerical simulations. In addition, we investigate partial scan artifact in a single source 64-slice diagnostic CT scanner in vivo data sets, and report its effect on perfusion analysis. Results indicated that among all three factors investigated, scatter can cause obvious partial scan artifact in dynamic myocardial perfusion imaging. Further, scatter is a low frequency phenomenon and is not heavily dependent on the changing contrasts, as both the frequency method and the virtual scan method are effective in reducing partial scan artifact. However, PSA does not necessarily lead to different blood volume maps compared to the full scan, because these maps are usually generated with a curve fitting procedure.
