PET-SORTEO: a Monte Carlo-based Simulator with high count rate capabilities

Monte Carlo-based PET simulators are powerful tools for accurately generating projections of tracer distributions for given scanner specifications and attenuating media distributions. High activity-related phenomena, such as the randoms contribution as well as block and system deadtimes constitute a large source of artefact and must therefore be integrated within the simulation model along with the γ-ray interaction within the tissue or the scanner material. We present here the features of a Monte Carlo simulator, dedicated to full ring tomographs, which is able to generate scattered, unscattered, and randoms distributions from voxelized phantom descriptions, and which accounts for the data losses due to system deadtime. Simulations of the count rate performance of the ECAT Exact HR⁺ operating in 2-D and 3-D modes were found to be in good agreement with experimental measurements obtained for a wide range of activity levels and distributions.