PET Research Based On Monte Carlo Simulation Platform

Positron Emission tomography (PET) is an in vivo non-invasive functional imaging prototype. PET may provide an earlier diagnosis and more accurate staging than conventional anatomic imaging and has been widely used for disease detection including oncology, cardiology, neurology and what's more has been adopted by the pharmaceutical industry to study pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics to accelerate development of new drugs. The research of PET was emphasized nowadays and mainly focus on two points: First is the hardware precepts including the detectors, processing unit and structure of the PET, try to improve the efficiency and accuracy of data acquisition; Second is the image reconstruction algorithm try to find a more faster and accurate way to get high resolution reconstructed image. All this kinds of research depends on a whole real PET instrument. Modern PET scanners are very expensive and sophisticated pieces of equipment so it will face many problems to build a PET modalities in a lab and because the principal of PET researchers need to endure some radiation effect from PET. To avoid this kind of problems, a simulation platform based on Monte Carlo simulation was build to help the fundamental research.Monte Carlo simulation is very popular in nuclear related research and has been adopted by nuclear imaging area such as PET,SPECT,CT and so on. In this paper a typical Monte Carlo simulation platform based on Gate software was build to assist several researches here, including:1. Performance evaluation of a advanced combined Biography PET/CT scanner. The model was build with the simulation platform and the research covers the performance of PET part including special resolution, sensitivity, scatter fraction, image quality and the spatial resolution of CT part.2. A feasibility study of a double ring MircroPET prototype to convert a General-Purpose Animal PET scanner to high resolution and sensitivity.