A Compendium of Publicly Available Monte Carlo Transport Codes (including New Tools) for the Simulation of Radiation Imaging Detectors

Simulations play a vital role in the understanding and analysis of existing and emerging medical imaging technologies. Over the last years, Monte Carlo simulations have become increasingly necessary tools for studying the fundamental limitations and for the design and optimization of medical imaging systems. We compare available open-source software packages from the Division of Imaging and Applied Mathematics at the FDA for modeling scintillator- and semiconductor-based radiation imaging detectors for applications in x-ray and nuclear imaging including MANTIS, hybridMANTIS, cartesianDETEcT2, and ARTEMIS. We describe the significant features of these packages and discuss their advantages or disadvantages. We also introduce a graphical user interface which greatly facilitates the set up of simple experiments involving scintillator structures with columnar geometries.