Impact of respiratory motion on the detection of solitary pulmonary nodules with SPECT tumor imaging of NeoTect

We have previously modeled the respiratory motion of solitary pulmonary nodules (SPN) based on the change of location of anatomic structures within the lungs identified on breath-held CT images of volunteers acquired at two different stages of respiration. The goal of this investigation is to make use of this modeling to investigate the impact of respiratory motion on the detection of solitary pulmonary nodules with single photon emission computed tomographic (SPECT) imaging using Tc-99m labeled NeoTect. To do this, end-expiration and respiration-averaged source and attenuation maps were created from the NCAT phantom and input to the SIMIND Monte Carlo package.