Patent ID: 6878941

Claim:
Apparatus for producing attenuation corrected nuclear medicine images of patients, comprising: at least one gamma camera head that acquires nuclear image data suitable to produce a nuclear tomographic image at a first controllable rotation rate about an axis; at least one X-ray CT imager that acquires X-ray data suitable to produce an attenuation image for correction of the nuclear tomographic image at a second controllable rotation rate about the axis; and a controller that controls the data acquisition and first and second rotation rates to selectively provide at least one of the following modes of operation: (i) a movement gated NM imaging mode in which the second rotation rate is substantially higher than the first rotation rate and the data from each view of the X-ray acquisition is associated with one of a plurality of respiration gated time periods; (ii) a cardiac gated NM imaging mode in which the second rotation rate is substantially higher than the first rotation rate and the data from each view of the X-ray acquisition for different rotations is averaged, wherein the X-ray data is not correlated with the cardiac cycle; and (iii) a cardiac gated NM imaging mode in which the second rotation rate is higher than the first rotation rate and the X-ray data is binned in accordance with a same binning as the NM data.