Application of GATE to Simulate Respiratory Motion

Simulation is generally one important step in the validation of technique development of respiratory motion compensation prior to the clinic validation. Conventionally phantom used for respiratory motion simulation includes physical phantom, mechanical phantom or digital voxelised phantom. However, the physical phantom requests operator intervention. The mechanical phantom device costs are expensive. And the digital voxelised phantom usually requires normalization or convention of data before utilizing for respiratory motion simulation. In this paper, a simple approach of respiratory motion simulation is implemented by using GATE (Geant4 Application Tomography Emission) software packages. This approach has the features of less computational simulation and phantom setting up simply comparing with conventional phantoms for respiratory motion in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging.