[gate-users] Re: How to input a history file

[Mikhail Shilov]

Thanks everyone for the insightful replies. Sorry, I wasn't very clear in describing what I wanted to do but many has guessed anyway. 
Yes, I was thinking about a way of uploading "hits" type information (i.e. particle location and velocity vectors) at some boundary crossing location and then continue particle transport to the detectors in Gate. This way we can take advantage of the convenient Gate detector geometry interface but avoid significant simulation slow down due to the slow particle transport simulation in voxelized phantoms in Gate. So digiGate is not the answer since we still need to do particle transport in Gate  (in vacuum, collimator, crystall, etc...)

David,

The first option that you mentioned is exactly what I was looking for. Since I just started working with Gate and don't know the locations of the particular modules, could you tell me where to look for the GEANT4 particle generator links in Gate code. Thanks a lot.

-Mikhail

>Just some little remark, I think (but I may have misunderstood), that 
>the  Mikhail's need is to generate the initial photons with an external 
>program. And, as far as I understand, the digigate option asks the hits 
>(generation+transport+particle/detector interactions) to be processed. 
>So, no particle transportation is done with digigate. In such a case, 
>two options are possibles :
>1) Just use an external photon generator and link it to the GATE's 
>GEANT4 particle transport calls.
>2) Do generation AND transportation externally, and use digigate.
>
>If only the generation is needed, the first method seems to be much more 
>simple, because one doesn't need to translate the geometry description 
>(from the GATE macro) to another MC format (necessary to the particle 
>transport). May be the virtualMC architecture of ROOT (which is already 
>a quasi-dependency of GATE) could help if the second method is required.
>
>By
>-- 
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Mikhail A. Shilov
The Johns Hopkins University
Department of Radiology
Division of Medical Imaging Physics
Tel:  443-287-7315
Fax:  410-614-1977
mailto: mshilov1 at jhmi.edu