Editing STIR-ASIM Howto (section)

===ASIM idiosyncrasies===

According to the ASIM user guide, the PET machine definitions, which are text files, should be present in the same directory as the phantoms input. However, we found that with LINUX these machine definitions are first searched for in the present working directory (pwd) even when the phantom files are specified with a full path.

Simul, the program which interprets the voxelised emission phantom image which come from XCAT, seems to require that the phantom is a 16 bit big endian file. We found no way to modify this and it is possible that this behaviour is a bug. 

One issue with the documentation is that the ASIM users Guide was prepared on an old MAC using MS Word. This meant we have been unable to see many of the images and diagrams. This defeated me but also defeated J.F. The images are replaced with the message “QuickTime and a decompressor are needed to see this picture”

One nice feature is that the program logs include a print of the supplied command line together with an interpretation of what the parameters are taken to mean in terms of program actions.