Abstract ID: 232 The dawn of PET Monte Carlo: A personal experience.

In the seventies, several Monte Carlo programs were available in radiation physics. I had already developed a home-made Monte Carlo code for neutron transport to validate the experimental measurements of the efficiency of a large neutron counter for 10–200 MeV neutrons in a HEP experiment, when I participated at the first international on “Computer techniques in radiation transport and dosimetry”, organized by Walter R. Nelson and Theodore Jenkins in Erice (Trapani, Italy) in 1978: Graham Stevenson, Keran O’Brien, W. W. Engle, T. A. Gabriel, C. Ponti, Walter R. Nelson, Herbert Dinter, A. Van Ginneken, Tony W. Armstrong and J. Ranft were the speakers. It was there that I met with the EGS code and its author Walter Ralph Nelson. Since then I started my collaboration with Ralph Nelson on the use of the EGS3 Monte Carlo in Nuclear Medicine, with the first paper published in 1980 on Compton Tomography, followed by a series of papers on the simulation of the performance of a human PET based on MWPC’s, the first one in 1981. From these first wails in the PET domain EGS3 became EGS4 and then evolved into GEANT and finally into GATE to become an indispensable code for PET detector simulation. In this talk I will present my pristine research in the field of PET Monte Carlo simulations in the last 20 years of last century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]