Research on Electronic Simulation System of PET Based on Gate and Matlab

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a technology intensive complex medical product containing thousands of detector and data sampling channels, which leads to difficult debugging, excessive iterations, timeconsuming and high cost in early R&D stage. For solving this problem, a PET electrical simulation system was constructed in the paper based on Gate (Geant4 application for tomographic emission) and MATLAB (matrix laboratory, Mathworks Inc.). Firstly, the annihilation events with TOF (time-of flight) information are recorded by Gate and converted into photon pulse signals using DiSER (digital-single-event-reconstruction) model. The pulses are quantified by ADC (analog-to-digital converter) and transferred to the co-simulation module of FPGA (field programmable gate array) and MATLAB to verify the feasibility of FPGA-based hardware acquisition algorithm. Secondly, the data latched by co-simulation platform is presented to the coincidence processor implementable by FPGA in a pipelined manner to verify the algorithm's validity and optimality. Finally, the proposed simulation model is verified by experiments using a TOF-PET prototype and the Gate-Matlab co-simulation platform presented in the paper can span the development lifecycle of PET, and the basic ideas and principles can be extended to other fields flexibly.