Optical simulation of monolithic scintillator detectors using GATE/GEANT4

Van der Laan, D.J.; Schaart, D.R.; Maas, M.C.; Beekman, F.J.; Bruyndonckx, P.; Van Eijk, C.W.E.

doi:doi:10.1088/0031-9155/55/6/009

Optical simulation of monolithic scintillator detectors using GATE/GEANT4

Title

Optical simulation of monolithic scintillator detectors using GATE/GEANT4

Author

Van der Laan, D.J.
Schaart, D.R.
Maas, M.C.
Beekman, F.J.
Bruyndonckx, P.
Van Eijk, C.W.E.

Faculty

Applied Sciences

Department

RRR/Radiation, Radionuclides and Reactors

Date

2010-02-24

Abstract

Much research is being conducted on position-sensitive scintillation detectors for medical imaging, particularly for emission tomography. Monte Carlo simulations play an essential role in many of these research activities. As the scintillation process, the transport of scintillation photons through the crystal(s), and the conversion of these photons into electronic signals each have a major influence on the detector performance; all of these processes may need to be incorporated in the model to obtain accurate results. In this work the optical and scintillation models of the GEANT4 simulation toolkit are validated by comparing simulations and measurements on monolithic scintillator detectors for high-resolution positron emission tomography (PET). We have furthermore made the GEANT4 optical models available within the user-friendly GATE simulation platform (as of version 3.0). It is shown how the necessary optical input parameters can be determined with sufficient accuracy. The results show that the optical physics models of GATE/GEANT4 enable accurate prediction of the spatial and energy resolution of monolithic scintillator PET detectors.

Subject

medical physics

To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6ee02621-4dff-4d60-9fc0-e449b0346994

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1088/0031-9155/55/6/009

Publisher

Institute of Physics

ISSN

0031-9155

Source

http://iopscience.iop.org/0031-9155/55/6/009