Monte Carlo Simulation of a Curved-Detector Gamma Camera

Masters Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Medicine - Radiology, Nuclear Medicine, grade: with Honours Degree, University of Aberdeen, course: Medical Physics, language: English, abstract: This study aims to develop a fully curved gamma camera using a Monte Carlo simulation in GATE to investigate whether there are any advantages to this configuration in terms of sensitivity or resolution. Both flat and curved detectors were simulated using the same materials and collimator hole diminutions to ensure valid comparable results. There were four sets of simulations conducted with different phantom sizes and different parameters to get comprehensive results. Then, ROOT and Jupyter Notebook were used to analyse the data to give the necessary visual and quantitative data to compare the two detectors. As a result, the curved detector proved to be better in terms of sensitivity in all simulation sets and yielded a better result with less noisy images when imaging small phantoms; nevertheless, it was more susceptible to high-energy photons, which penetrated the collimator and effected the image negatively. However, the flat detector was shown to be better in terms of resolution when imaging a large phantom and more immune to the high-energy collimator-penetrating photons. In addition, the flat detector images when imaging a larger phantom had less scattered photons and less noise. To conclude, further studies could be done to develop the proposed configuration and reach its maximum potential.