THE CIRCULAR HARMONIC TRANSFORM FOR SPECT RECONSTRUCTION AND BOUNDARY-CONDITIONS ON THE FOURIER-TRANSFORM OF THE SINOGRAM

The circular harmonic transform (CHT) solution of the exponential radon transform (ERT) is applied to single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) for uniform attenuation within a convex boundary. An important special case also considered is the linear (unattenuated) radon transform (LRT). The solution is on the form of an orthogonal function expansion matched to projections that are in parallel-ray geometry. This property allows for efficient and accurate processing of the projections with fast Fourier transform (FFT) without interpolation or beam matching. The algorithm is optimized by the use of boundary conditions on the 2-D Fourier transform of the sinogram. These boundary conditions imply that the signal energy of the sinogram is concentrated in well-defined sectors in transform space. The angle defining the sectors depends in a direct way on the radius of the field view. These results are also obtained for fan-beam geometry and the linear Radon transform (the Fourier-Chebyshev transform of the sinogram) to demonstrate that the boundary conditions are a more general property of the Radon transform and a not a property unique to rectangular coordinates. Simulations with a liver-spleen phantom and patient data are used to support these results.