Optical imaging simulation using GATE

The Geant4 Application for Emission Tomography (GATE) is an advanced opensource software dedicated to Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations in medical imaging involving photon transportation (positron emission tomography, single photon emission computed tomography, computed tomography) and in particle therapy. In this work, we extend GATE to support simulations of optical imaging such as bioluminescence or fluorescence imaging and validate it against the Monte-Carlo for Multi-Layered media simulation tool. A full simulation set-up for molecular optical imaging (bioluminescence or fluorescence) is implemented and 2D images of the light distribution emitted from a phantom is provided through the GATE software.