Abstract
SPECT quantitation and image contrast are degraded by photon scatter. Water equivalent depths (WEDs) have been used by several investigators to model scatter responses in non-uniform attenuators. The drawback of this approach is the occurrence of undesired fluctuations in the shape of the scatter responses, as is shown by measurements. An improvement of the WED method is presented, based on the assumption that only a part of the scattering object (the region in the `scatter cone') contributes significantly to the detected scatter events. The remaining part of the object is treated as a uniform medium. The extension of the WED method with extra-conical invariance 
is evaluated by projection measurements of a phantom with a 
source. Shapes of scatter responses predicted by the 
method are found to agree better with the measurements than those predicted by conventional WEDs.