[Gate-users] Possible bug in multi-system base level volume ID

[Marc Chamberland]

Hi Gate Users and Developers,

Sonoko Nakano and I believe we have found a bug in how Gate handles the volume ID of multi-system simulations.

The specific case we have found concerns the simulation of several SPECThead systems. If N number of SPECTheads are simulated, we expect to see volume IDs ranging from 0 to N-1 in column 7 of the singles ASCII output. This column corresponds to the 'base' level volume ID.

However, in the most current version of Gate, this column is filled with 0, indicating that all SPECT systems share the same volume ID for the 'base' level. We do not think this is the correct behaviour.

We seem to have found a fix: in the file GateVSystem.cc, the following line (line 184 in my version) is commented out:

 //outputVolumeID[0]=this->GetItsNumber();

If it is un-commented, then each SPECT system gets the correct volume ID for its 'base' level.

The comment above this line of code (" Set the first cell to the systemID") seems to indicate that this is the correct solution for this problem. However, we are not sure what was the original developer's intent behind commenting out the line above. Was this simply an oversight?

Hopefully, this information is useful to someone and the problem is fixed in the next release.

Cheers,
Marc



__________________________

Marc Chamberland, MSc
PhD candidate
Department of Physics
Carleton University
Ottawa (ON)