Software development for modeling positrons emission tomograph scanners

The Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission (GATE) is an international platform recognized and used to develop Computational Model Exposure (CME) in the context of Nuclear Medicine, although currently there are dedicated modules for applications in Radiotherapy and Computed Tomography (CT). GATE uses Monte Carlo (MC) methods, and has a scripting language of its own. The writing of scripts for simulation of a PET scanner in GATE involves a number of interrelated steps, and the accuracy of the simulation is dependent on the correct setup of the geometries involved, since the physical processes depend on them, as well as the modeling of electronic detectors in module Digitizer, for example. The manual implementation of this setup can be a source of errors, especially for users without experience in the field of simulations or without any previous knowledge of a programming language, and also due to the the fact that the modeling process in GATE still remains bounded to LINUX / UNIX based systems, an environment only familiar to a few. This becomes an obstacle for beginners and prevents the use of GATE by a larger number of users interested in optimizing their experiments and/or clinical protocols through a more accessible, fast and friendly application. The objective of this work is therefore to develop a user-friendly software for the modeling of Positron Emission Tomography called GUIGATE (Graphical User Interface for GATE), with specific modules dedicated to quality control in PET scanners. The results exhibit the features available in this first version of GUIGATE, present in a set of windows that allow users to create their input files, perform and display in real time the model and analyze its output file in a single environment, allowing so intuitively access the entire architecture of the GATE simulation and to CERN's data analyzer, the ROOT. (author)