Execution of the SimSET Monte Carlo PET/SPECT Simulator in the Condor Distributed Computing Environment

SimSET is a package for simulation of emission tomography data sets. Condor is a popular distributed computing environment. Simple C/C++ applications and shell scripts are presented which allow the execution of SimSET on the Condor environment. This is accomplished without any modification to SimSET by executing multiple instances and using its combinebin utility. This enables research facilities without dedicated parallel computing systems to utilize the idle cycles of desktop workstations to greatly reduce the run times of their SimSET simulations. The necessary steps to implement this approach in other environments are presented along with sample results

An Observation Model for Motion Correction in Nuclear Medicine

This paper describes a method of using a tracking system to track the upper part of the anterior surface during scanning for developing patient-specific models of respiration. In the experimental analysis, the natural variation in the anterior surface during breathing will be modeled to reveal the dominant pattern in the breathing cycle. The main target is to produce a patient-specific set of parameters that describes the configuration of the anterior surface for all respiration phases. These data then will be linked to internal organ motion to identify the effect of the morphology of each on motion using particle filter to account for previously unseen patterns of motion. In this initial study, a set of volunteers were imaged using the Codamotion infrared marker-based system. In the marker-based system, the temporal variation of the respiratory motion was studied. This showed that for the 12 volunteer cohort, the mean displacement of the thorax surface TS (abdomen surface AS) region is 10.7±5.6 mm (16.0±9.5mm). Finally, PCA was shown to capture the redundancy in the data set with the first principal component (PC) accounting for more than 96% of the overall variance in both AS and TS datasets. A fitting to the dominant modes of variation using a simple piecewise sinusoid has suggested a maximum error of about 1.1mm across the complete cohort dataset