Quality Control of Scintillation Cameras (Planar and SPECT)

The purpose of quality control (QC) is to detect changes in the performance of a gamma camera system that may adversely affect the interpretation of clinical studies. Clearly, there are a large number of factors that contribute to the final image quality, including uniformity, resolution (both intrinsic and energy), collimation and the hard copy device. In addition, for certain types of studies, other factors such as count rate capability come into play. With the addition of tomographic imaging, comes an additional suite of parameters that can influence the clinical images these include system center of rotation, gantry and collimator hole alignment, rotational stability of the detector head and the integrity of the reconstruction algorithms. On a day-to-day basis, there is a limited amount of time that can be reasonably devoted to system QC. Hence the main goal of a QC program should be to monitor those parameters that are a) most sensitive to changes in system performance and b) most likely to impact clinical studies. This review will focus on some of the more critical areas in the quality control of gamma camera systems.