Preliminary Experience With The Photon History Generator Module Of A Public-domain Simulation System For Emission Tomography

We are developing a software simulation system for emission tomography (SimSET). All the software is being designed and documented using modern software engineering techniques. As modules in the system are completed they will be placed in the public domain. The first module of SimSET to be released, the photon history generator (PHG), tracks photons through the tomograph field-of-view. The PHG incorporates importance sampling [I] and allows source activity and attenuation to be modeled as voxelized objects in three dimensions. The input format for the source object has been chosen to match the digitized anthropomorphic phantom of Zubal et a1 [2], allowing physiologically realistic phantoms to be easily simulated.

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