Sensitivity and Distortion Studies of Positron Emission Trancking System (PeTrack)

Positron Emission Tracking (PeTrack) is a new real-time 3D tracking technique. The project studied the sensitivity and distortion of the PeTrack system with four different detector field of view (FOV) configurations using Monte-Carlo simulation software (GATE). The simulation studies demonstrated the clear boundaries for FOV and also revealed a local distortion up to 1 mm for PeTrack. The simulation also showed that the detector misalignment could introduce the distortion to the system. The results of simulations lead us to calibrate the PeTrack system to obtain the global scaling factors. However, since PeTrack has a non-uniform distortion across FOV, the global scaling factors were helpful to only some extent. The value of calculated average error after global scaling correction is less than 1 mm. The PeTrack system is also co-registered with an x-ray imaging C-arm to evaluate the tracking performance.