Radionuclide synthetic Fourier images of cardiac wall motion abnormalities.
At present, the phase images together with amplitude images are used in nuclear medicine to aid the diagnosis of cardiac regional wall motion abnormalities (RWMA). The phase images represent the spatial distribution of the relative phase of the first harmonic fit of pixel time activity curves, and the amplitude images represent the distribution of the amplitude of the fit. These images contain only part of the information present in the original radionuclide images, and have to be mentally integrated with other known information to obtain a diagnosis. The proposed synthetic Fourier images overcome these deficiencies as their pixel intensity is a function of additional Fourier parameters of pixel time activity curves and of pixel location and are not limited to the first harmonic. But most importantly, their computation is based on "teaching" the computer by examples of previously diagnosed cases. The images offer direct and robust diagnosis which is superior to that derived from separate phase and amplitude images, especially for the detection of mild RWMA.