A GUI application for creating macrofiles in GATE

Abstract

GEANT4 Application for Tomographic Emission (GATE) is a Monte Carlo simulation toolkit based on GEANT4 for PET and SPECT. GATE uses a high intuitive linear script language in a way that the code describing a system can be thought as a combination of separate objects, each one with certain parameters. The above structure of GATE's script language implies that by defining all the parameters involved in a certain implementation, the macrofiles can be created automatically, using appropriate software. The Gate Editor project, based on the above idea, aims the development of a homonym window application that exports GATE scripts based on easy to understand parameters given by the end user. Gate Editor is developed using the C++ program language in Linux environment. A WindowsXP version is also available. Object Oriented Programming allows the description of PET/SPECT system components with relative objects belonging to corresponding classes. Gate Editor is able to export macrofiles of low complicity (like the SPECT and PET benchmarks supplied with GATE). Objects such as collimator, crystal, detector blocks and sources can be described in the ‘real world’ and automatically constructed in ‘GATE world’. The relative position of these objects is adjusted as well, all under a user-friendly interface. The end user can create his own code without concerning for the exact syntax of GATE's script language. For more realistic and complicated implementations though, further development is required.