RT Journal Article
T1 UMC-PET: a fast and flexible Monte Carlo PET simulator
A1 Galve Lahoz, Pablo
A1 Arias Valcayo, Fernando
A1 Villa Abaunza, Amaia
A1 Ibáñez García, Paula Beatriz
A1 Udías Moinelo, José Manuel
AB Objective. The GPU-based Ultra-fast Monte Carlo positron emission tomography simulator (UMC-PET) incorporates the physics of the emission, transport and detection of radiation in PET scanners. It includes positron range, non-colinearity, scatter and attenuation, as well as detector response. The objective of this work is to present and validate UMC-PET as a a multi-purpose, accurate, fast and flexible PET simulator. Approach. We compared UMC-PET against PeneloPET, a well-validated MC PET simulator, both in preclinical and clinical scenarios. Different phantoms for scatter fraction (SF) assessment following NEMA protocols were simulated in a 6R-SuperArgus and a Biograph mMR scanner, comparing energy histograms, NEMA SF, and sensitivity for different energy windows. A comparison with real data reported in the literature on the Biograph scanner is also shown. Main results. NEMA SF and sensitivity estimated by UMC-PET where within few percent of PeneloPET predictions. The discrepancies can be attributed to small differences in the physics modeling. Running in a 11 GB GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU, UMC-PET is ∼1500 to ∼2000 times faster than PeneloPET executing in a single core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W-2155 @ 3.30 GHz. Significance. UMC-PET employs a voxelized scheme for the scanner, patient adjacent objects (such as shieldings or the patient bed), and the activity distribution. This makes UMC-PET extremely flexible. Its high simulation speed allows applications such as MC scatter correction, faster SRM estimation for complex scanners, or even MC iterative image reconstruction.
PB IOP Publishing
SN 1361-6560
YR 2024
FD 2024-01-30
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/108722
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/108722
LA eng
NO Pablo Galve et al 2024 Phys. Med. Biol. 69 035018
NO Se deposita la versión postprint del artículo"CT18/22 Margarita Salas Fellowship"
NO Agencia Estatal de Investigación (España)
NO European Commission
NO Comunidad de Madrid
NO Instituto de Salud Carlos III
NO Universidad Complutense de Madrid
DS Docta Complutense
RD 28 mar 2026