Abstract
In this work, a major effort has been made to establish an Internet accessible system for medical imaging simulation as a convenient service under the cloud computing environment. First, an Internet accessible, medical imaging education platform has been developed. It includes teaching and dynamic assessment tracking system for five commonly used imaging modalities. The system is integrated by the open source MySQL database software that manages updating materials and also tracks students’ learning engagements, which allow the reliability and appropriateness of the on-line teaching material and assessment methods to be optimized. The evaluation results have shown increased learning gains promisingly. Second, a prototype simulation service platform has been established. It is based on a job-oriented work flow to provide different kinds of service to users to perform medical imaging simulation. These simulations not only include the straightforward CT data reconstruction based on Radon transform, but also the sophisticated PET imaging simulation based on GATE as well. The QGATE’s client-server configuration can manage the GATE system to queue and monitor the submitted simulation scripts and return simulation results. The system is suitable for classroom training and easy to use for students or new users to the field of nuclear medicine imaging simulation. Finally, based on the developed simulation platform, a simulation study on PET imaging has been carried out. Event-based dynamic justification method has been tested based on the phantoms generated by NCAT associated with different breathing signals. The results show its potential capability of motion correction for PET data acquisition.