An Initial Study for PET Imaging Simulation

Simulation play an important role in the research of PET/CT imaging technology. In this paper, GATE (Geant4 Application Tomography Emission) software packages and NCAT(dynamic NURBS-based cardiac-torso phantom) were used to simulate GE ST PET/CT imaging. GATE provides abundant of functions to simulate both PET/CT imaging procedure and geometric phantom generation. NCAT can generate voxlised body torso phantom. Three different kinds of digital phantoms were designed and generated for PET/CT imaging simulation. The simulation output of GATE was converted to the data format that the STIR (Software for Tomographic Image Reconstruction) requires to reconstruct image by the OSEM (ordered subsets expectation-maximization) algorithm. The experiment results validate that GATE and NCAT are able to simulate PET/CT imaging.