An initial digital phantom PET imaging simulation study by GATE

The approach of simulation plays an essential role in the research of PET/CT imaging technology. In this paper, a digital phantom simulation study of the GE ST PET/CT acquisition implemented by GATE (Geant4 Application Tomography Emission) software packages and NCAT(dynamic NURBS-based cardiac-torso phantom)was presented. GATE provides abundant of functions to simulate both SPECT/PET imaging procedure and phantom generation. The simulation experiment based on three different kinds of digital phantoms were designed and implemented. 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 and the result of image reconstruction could be present in a 3-D space. The initial simulation result base on digital phantoms shows that GATE and STIR can be used to simulate PET/CT imaging.