Analysis, Simulation And Performance Evaluation Of PET Projection Process

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) plays an important role in the staging and restaging of cancer by showing the functional activity of neoplasms with respect to normal tissues. More attention has been paid to this area with wide application of PET scanners and fast development of interrelated technologies. The primary coverage of this work is the GE Discovery LS PET/CT scanner implementation with simulation method and characterization with the National Electronic Manufacturers Association (NEMA) NU2-1994. This paper specifies procedures for the implementation and the evaluation of PET tomography performances. GATE (Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission) is a Mont Carlo simulation platform for nuclear medical imaging based on the G4 toolkit package, it was used to model the GE Discovery LS Systems prototype PET scanner consisting on 18 rings of 112 crystal block detectors containing 36 BGO crystal scintillators. The list of single events output by the GATE toolkit was post-processed off-line using an ROOT C-code to generate the Interfile3.3 sinogram data taking into account the DLS geometry. The aim of the study was to validate the simulation against experimentally measured data on the prototype system. We performed for the comparison three sets of experiments: intrinsic spatial resolution, scatter fraction and absolute sensitivity. Real and simulated data were found to be in good agreement. Furthermore, the most important developments that were realized to have realistic simulation of the GE DLS scanner were discussed.