Introduction: It is essential to ensure the uniform response of the single photon emission computed tomography gamma camera system before using it for the clinical studies by exposing it to uniform flood source. Vendor specific acquisition and processing protocol provide for studying flood source images along with the quantitative uniformity parameters such as integral and differential uniformity. However, a significant difficulty is that the time required to acquire a flood source image varies from 10 to 35 min depending both on the activity of Cobalt-57 flood source and the pre specified counts in the vendors protocol (usually 4000K-10,000K counts). In case the acquired total counts are less than the total prespecified counts, and then the vendor's uniformity processing protocol does not precede with the computation of the quantitative uniformity parameters. In this study, we have developed and verified a technique for reading the flood source image, remove unwanted information, and automatically extract and save the useful field of view and central field of view images for the calculation of the uniformity parameters.
Materials and methods: This was implemented using MATLAB R2013b running on Ubuntu Operating system and was verified by subjecting it to the simulated and real flood sources images.
Results: The accuracy of the technique was found to be encouraging, especially in view of practical difficulties with vendor-specific protocols.
Conclusion: It may be used as a preprocessing step while calculating uniformity parameters of the gamma camera in lesser time with fewer constraints.
Keywords: Central field of view; Cobalt 57 flood source; extraction of useful field of view; gamma camera; uniformity.