The IMPET article on positronium decay modelling in GATE has been published in Physics in Medicine & Biology.
Positronium lifetime imaging promises to tell us not only where a tracer is, but what the surrounding material is like. Simulating it properly, however, was not possible: GATE, the most popular PET simulation package, supported at most two decay channels, while real materials — from tissue to porous polymers —show several lifetime components at once.
Our model removes that limit. Users can define any number of decay channels, each with its own lifetime, branching fraction and annihilation multiplicity, plus optional prompt photon emission. We validated it against analytical benchmarks and demonstrated it on NEMA phantom simulations with tissue-mimicking sources. The code is merged into the official GATE release and is free to use.
We worked with colleagues at NCBJ, Jagiellonian University, Lyon, IT:U Linz, and the University of Vienna. A few research groups have already started testing it.