Improving the precision and accuracy of Monte Carlo simulation in positron emission tomography

The authors present a technique to elaborate a lookup table for Monte Carlo simulation of PET (positron emission tomography) scanners that contains information about the Compton scattering and photoelectric linear attenuations for a list of materials that are likely to be used. More realistic geometries are now possible, since one can simulate a brain or a heart. This enables one to generate effective count-rate curves for organs of interest as well as traditional flood phantoms. Materials can also be added to the lookup table. Evaluation of detector materials can be performed more simply in the simulation program with this technique. The authors have also demonstrated that the precision and the accuracy of the PETSIM programs can be improved by recycling the data. The coincidence spectrum being less noisy, they assume that all other parameters (sensitivity, count-rate performance, resolution) will improve in the same way, which is usually the case when better statistics are achieved.<>