ABSTRACT
Since 1990 our laboratory, the Imaging Research Laboratory at the University of Washington, has developed and distributed the Simulation System for Emission Tomography (SimSET), a photon-tracking Monte Carlo simulation of emission tomography. When we began the project, most nuclear medicine simulations either used one of the high-energy physics simulations (e.g., EGS [1], MCNP [2], Géant [3]) or software written for a speci‰c project. The former simulations were too slow and dif‰cult to set up for many simulations of patient scans in tomographs; the latter were often not suitable for distribution and/or not °exible enough to use for research other than the intended project. Thus, our goals were (1) to provide a software system that was highly modular, portable, and ef‰cient; (2) to provide a simulation targeted speci‰cally at emission tomography applications; (3) to optimize the code for simulating heterogeneous objects in three dimensions; and (4) to produce an easy-to-use, well-documented code without unnecessary complexities. To help ful‰l these goals, early versions of the software were carefully engineered [4] leading to a clear and consistent modular code structure that has reduced the engineering effort for later revisions.
