PeneloPET, a Monte Carlo PET simulation toolkit based on PENELOPE: features and validation

Proceeding of: 2006 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record, San Diego, California, Oct. 29 – Nov. 4, 2006PENELOPE is a Monte Carlo code that simulates the transport in matter of electrons, positrons and photons with energies from a few hundred of eV to 1 GeV. It is robust, fast and very accurate, but it may be unfriendly for people not acquainted with the FORTRAN programming language. We have developed a tookit (‘PeneloPET’) to prepare simulations of PET and SPECT within PENELOPE. Sophisticated simulations can be setup by modifying just a few simple input files. The output data can be generated at different levels of detail and can be analyzed afterwards with the preferred programming language or tools. In this work, we present the features of PeneloPET as well as validations against other dedicated PET simulation programs and two real scanners.Support from MEC (FPA2006-07393) and CDTEAM (CENIT-Ingenio 2010) Ministerio de Industria, Spain, projects. The numerical computations of this work were done at the “High capacity cluster for physical techniques'' of the Faculty for Physical Sciences of the UCM, funded in part by the UE under the FEDER programme and in part by the UCM. Parts of this work were performed under the HGGMUCM contract "Modelización de escáneres PET de alta resolución y reconstrucción estadística de imágenes PET en animales pequeños"