An initial simulation study of PET imaging by GATE

The approach of simulation plays an essential role in the research of PET/CT imaging technology. In this paper, a simulation study of the GE ST PET/CT acquisition implemented by GATE (Geant4 Application Tomography Emission) software packages was presented. GATE provides abundant of functions to simulate both SPECT/PET imaging procedure and phantom generation. The simulation experiment based on the geometry phantom was 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 shows that GATE and STIR can be used to simulate PET/CT imaging.