Modeling, Computation, and Simulations of PET Physics, Components, Systems, and Phantom/Patient Studies
Monte Carlo simulations of positron and photon propagation in simulated tissues and in the detector materials help to guide new PET system design, provide data to develop and test novel signal processing algorithms, and assess potential image quality and quantification improvements of new and existing hardware and software. However, Monte Carlo simulations of PET systems are typically computationally expensive and require a large CPU cluster to increase computational efficiency. To address this issue, we have developed an accelerated PET simulator that borrows strategies, such as ray tracing, from the field of computer graphics to accelerate certain operations that are key to accelerated, yet accurate modeling of photon propagation. In addition, we are working on modifying the most computationally demanding sub-routines of the simulation to the GPU for further acceleration without compromising accuracy.