Work

Technical Note: Standalone application to generate custom reflectance Look‐Up Table for advanced optical Monte Carlo simulation in GATE/Geant4

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: PURPOSE: The need for high-fidelity modeling of radiation detectors to perform reliable detector performance optimization using Monte Carlo simulations requires to accurately simulate the light transport in the scintillator and the light collection by the photodetector. In this work, we implement our well-validated crystal reflectance model computed from three-dimensional (3D) crystal surface measurement in a standalone open-source application to allow researchers to generate fully customized crystal reflectance look-up-tables (LUTs) to be used in optical Monte Carlo simulation. METHODS: The LUTDavisModel application can be installed in a few minutes on Windows, macOS, and Linux, using 26 MB of space. MATLAB Runtime is required and is automatically installed with the application. The core algorithm has been previously validated experimentally and implemented in GATE v8.0. The standalone is divided into five panels, each of which performing a specific task: generate LUTs from a combination of surface type, scintillator, and coupling medium available in the database (such as LSO or BGO) or custom; compute LUTs with the reflectors available and custom coupling thickness; create a mixture of coupling media to account for possible defects in the optical coupling; plot precomputed LUTs for visual comparison. Tooltips and errors/warnings facilitate the navigation. The reported computational times were obtained with an Intel Core i7 MacBook Pro. RESULTS: ) due to increased photon tracking. CONCLUSIONS: We developed a user-friendly standalone application to generate LUTs that can be used inside GATE Monte Carlo simulations. It can be easily downloaded, installed, and used. Future optimizations will expand the database, decrease the computational time through greater parallelization, and include the generation of LUTs to study Cerenkov photons transport.

Source: Medical Physics

DOI: 10.1002/mp.14863

Authors: Carlotta Trigila, Eshani Moghe, Emilie Roncali

Institution: University of California, Davis

Language: English

Topic: Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies

Subfield: Radiation

Field: Physics and Astronomy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering

Awards: G1864703947, G4865452602