Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 15, 2612 JB Delft, The Netherlands.
University Medical Centre Utrecht, Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neurosciences and Image Sciences Institute, Heidelberglaan 100, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Phys Med Biol. 2010 Mar 21;55(6):1659-75. doi: 10.1088/0031-9155/55/6/009. Epub 2010 Feb 24.
Much research is being conducted on position-sensitive scintillation detectors for medical imaging, particularly for emission tomography. Monte Carlo simulations play an essential role in many of these research activities. As the scintillation process, the transport of scintillation photons through the crystal(s), and the conversion of these photons into electronic signals each have a major influence on the detector performance; all of these processes may need to be incorporated in the model to obtain accurate results. In this work the optical and scintillation models of the GEANT4 simulation toolkit are validated by comparing simulations and measurements on monolithic scintillator detectors for high-resolution positron emission tomography (PET). We have furthermore made the GEANT4 optical models available within the user-friendly GATE simulation platform (as of version 3.0). It is shown how the necessary optical input parameters can be determined with sufficient accuracy. The results show that the optical physics models of GATE/GEANT4 enable accurate prediction of the spatial and energy resolution of monolithic scintillator PET detectors.
正在进行大量针对医学成像（尤其是发射断层扫描）的位置敏感闪烁探测器的研究。蒙特卡罗模拟在许多这些研究活动中起着至关重要的作用。由于闪烁过程、闪烁光子在晶体中的传输以及这些光子转换为电子信号都会对探测器性能产生重大影响，因此所有这些过程都可能需要包含在模型中以获得准确的结果。在这项工作中，通过对用于高分辨率正电子发射断层扫描（PET）的单片闪烁探测器的模拟和测量，验证了 GEANT4 模拟工具包的光学和闪烁模型。此外，我们还在用户友好的 GATE 模拟平台（截至 3.0 版）中提供了 GEANT4 的光学模型。展示了如何以足够的精度确定必要的光学输入参数。结果表明，GATE/GEANT4 的光学物理模型能够准确预测单片闪烁体 PET 探测器的空间和能量分辨率。
