GATE (Geant4 Application for Emission Tomography) is a Monte Carlo simulation platform developed by the OpenGATE collaboration since 2001 and first publicly released in 2004. Dedicated to the modelling of planar scintigraphy, single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and positron emission tomography (PET) acquisitions, this platform is widely used to assist PET and SPECT research. A recent extension of this platform, released by the OpenGATE collaboration as GATE V6, now also enables modelling of x-ray computed tomography and radiation therapy experiments. This paper presents an overview of the main additions and improvements implemented in GATE since the publication of the initial GATE paper (Jan et al 2004 Phys. Med. Biol. 49 4543-61). This includes new models available in GATE to simulate optical and hadronic processes, novelties in modelling tracer, organ or detector motion, new options for speeding up GATE simulations, examples illustrating the use of GATE V6 in radiotherapy applications and CT simulations, and preliminary results regarding the validation of GATE V6 for radiation therapy applications. Upon completion of extensive validation studies, GATE is expected to become a valuable tool for simulations involving both radiotherapy and imaging.

Results:The new 3-FLAB algorithm is able to extract the overall tumour from the background tissues, as well as delineate variable uptake regions within the tumours, with higher accuracy and robustness compared to adaptive threshold (T bckg ) and fuzzy C-means (FCM). 3-FLAB performed with a mean classification error of less than 9±8% on the simulated tumours whereas binary-only implementation led to errors of 15±11%. T bckg and FCM lead to mean errors of 20±12% and 17±14% respectively. 3-FLAB also lead to more robust estimation of the maximum diameters of tumours with histology measurements, with less than 6% standard deviation whereas binary FLAB, T bckg and FCM lead to 10%, 12% and 13% respectively. Conclusion:These encouraging results warrants further investigation in future studies that will investigate the impact of 3-FLAB in radiotherapy treatment planning, diagnosis and therapy response evaluation

A new 3D local model was proposed for a voxel-wise PVE correction based on the original mutual multiresolution analysis approach. Its evaluation demonstrated an improved and more robust qualitative and quantitative accuracy compared to the original MMA methodology, particularly in the absence of full correlation between anatomical and functional information.

Among Monte Carlo simulation codes in medical imaging, the GATE simulation platform is widely used today given its flexibility and accuracy, despite long run times, which in SPECT simulations, is mostly spent in tracking photons through the collimators. In this work, a tabulated model of the collimator/detector response was implemented within the GATE framework to significantly reduce the simulation times in SPECT. This implementation uses the Angular Response Function (ARF) model. The performance of the implemented ARF approach has been compared to standard SPECT GATE simulations in terms of the ARF tables' accuracy, overall SPECT system performance and run times. Considering the simulation of the Siemens Symbia T SPECT system using high-energy collimators, differences of less than 1% were measured between the ARF based and the standard GATE based simulations, while considering the same noise level in the projections, acceleration factors of up to 180 were obtained when simulating a planar 364keV source seen with the same SPECT system. The ARF-based and the standard GATE simulation results also agreed very well when considering a 4-head SPECT simulation of a realistic Jaszczak phantom filled with iodine-131, with a resulting acceleration factor of 100. In conclusion, the implementation of an ARF-based model of collimator/detector response for SPECT simulations within GATE significantly reduces the simulation run times without compromising accuracy.