Validation of a realistic simulation of the HRRT using SimSET

Monte-Carlo simulations of the High Resolution Research Tomograph (HRRT) (Siemens/CTI HRRT PET brain scanner) were developed and conducted using SimSET. We were interested in conducting simulations with comparable resolution to that of a real HRRT in order to investigate partial volume correction. A series of test objects were simulated including point sources, a 3-D Shepp-Logan digital phantom and a brain amyloid scan and compared to measured HRRT data. We found that we needed to include additional detection mispositioning in order to match the resolution of real HRRT data. With this additional mispositioning we achieved comparable spatially variant resolutions between the simulations and real data, although the simulated data was less noisy than the real data.