Development of a new generation of PET imaging techniques

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) [Cherry et al., 2012] is a branch of nuclear medicine in which b+ radiation is used to provide valuable information on physiological processes in the body. Since the first commercially available scanner was developed in 1978 [Phelps et al., 1977], important advances have been made in the technique to improve the image quality. As a result, the amount and complexity of data generatedby new generations of PET scanners have drastically increased, requiring more computational power to keep the clinical workflow at reasonable duration, as well as improved models to make use of the increased resolution and improving corrections. In this thesis, we have tackled the current needs with the development of different tools for PET image reconstruction and simulation on the basis of speed, flexibility, and accuracy. All the software and methods presented in this work have been accelerate dwith parallel computing on the graphical processing units (GPU), and they have been designed to adapt to any scanner design. In the following, we present a summary of every chapter of this thesis..