Positron follow-up in liquid water: II. Spatial and energetic study for the most important radioisotopes used in PET

With the increasing development of positron emission tomography (PET), beta(+)-emitters are more and more regularly used in nuclear medicine. Therefore, today it is of prime importance to have a reliable description of their behavior in living matter in order to quantify the full spectra of the molecular damages potentially radio-induced and then to access a cellular dosimetry. In this work, we present a detailed inter-comparison of the main isotopes commonly used in PET: F-18, C-11, N-13, O-15, Ga-68 and Rb-82. We have used an event-by-event Monte Carlo code recently developed for positron tracking in water (Champion and Le Loirec 2006 Phys. Med. Biol. 51 1707-23) which consists in simulating step-by-step, interaction after interaction, the history of each ionizing particle created during the irradiation of the biological matter. This simulation has been finally adapted for describing the decays of medically important positron emitters. Quantitative information about positron penetrations, Positronium formation, annihilation event distributions, energy deposit patterns and dose profiles is then accessible and compared to published measurements and/or calculations.