Monte Carlo Simulations in Medical Imaging
Monte Carlo simulations have become crucial tools in many fields of medical imaging. First of all they help understanding the influence of physical effects such as absorption, scattering and fluorescence of photons in different materials as silicon, GaAs, Cd(Zn)Te, etc. to image quality parameters like the detective quantum efficiency (DQE). In this context Monte Carlo simulations are often used as the first step in a charge transport simulation in semiconductor X-ray detectors. But besides considering the physics, Monte Carlo simulations allow to study new concepts of processing the information about detected photons like photon counting, energy weighting or material reconstruction to image quality.
Furthermore there are important applications of Monte Carlo Simulations in the fields of nuclear medicine like PET, SPECT and Compton Camera. For example it is possible to define virtual setups to find new geometries or image reconstruction algorithms.
Finally, a full implementation of the propagation physics of electrons and photons allows the prediction of the behaviour of (novel) X-ray generation concepts.
This versatility of Monte Carlo simulations will be shown with ROSI as an example of a modern, well proven, object-oriented, parallel computing Monte Carlo simulation.
