A computational fluid dynamic approach and Monte Carlo simulation of phantom mixing techniques for quality control testing of gamma cameras

• Main Author: Yang, Qing
• Language: en
• Published: University of Canterbury. Physics and Astronomy 2013
• Subjects: Gamma camera; Quality control test; Mixing techniques; Monte Carlo Simulation; Fluid Dynamics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10092/8742

In order to reduce the unnecessary radiation exposure for the clinical personnel, the optimization of procedures in the quality control test of gamma camera was investigated. A significant component of the radiation dose in performing the quality control testing is handling phantoms of radioactivity, especially the mixing to get a uniform activity concentration. Improving the phantom mixing techniques appeared to be a means of reducing radiation dose to personnel. However, this is difficult to perform without a continuous dynamic tomographic acquisition system to study mixing the phantom. In the first part of this study a computational fluid dynamics model was investigated to simulate the mixing procedure. Mixing techniques of shaking and spinning were simulated using the computational fluid dynamics tool FLUENT. In the second part of this study a Siemens E.Cam gamma camera was simulated using the Monte Carlo software SIMIND. A series of validation experiments demonstrated the reliability of the Monte Carlo simulation. In the third part of this study the simulated the mixing data from FLUENT was used as the source distribution in SIMIND to simulate a tomographic acquisition of the phantom. The planar data from the simulation was reconstructed using filtered back projection to produce a tomographic data set for the activity distribution in the phantom. This completed the simulation routine for phantom mixing and verified the Proof-in-Concept that the phantom mixing problem can be studied using a combination of computational fluid dynamics and nuclear medicine radiation transport simulations.