GATERootToCastor Error when using variables

General Discussions
1

Hi all,

I’m new to CASToR. First of all, thanks a lot for building this great tool and all the documentation!!!

It has been fairly straight forward getting to know to most basic features so far, but I run into the following issue trying to use GATERootToCastor:
I have a geometry.mac file that describes the GATE scanner geometry and I use a lot of variables there that I defined e.g. as follows:
/control/alias variabelX 35
I then later use these variables to define scanner features such as:
/gate/LSO/geometry/setXLength {variabelX} mm
That all works great if I just run the GATE simulation. However when I then try to use GATERootToCastor I get the following error:

***** gOptions::ConvertFromString() → Invalid argument exception while trying to convert ‘{variabelX}’ into double
***** dataConversionUtilities::CreateGeomWithCylindrical()-> Conversion error occurred while trying to parse line: /gate/LSO/geometry/setXLength {variabelX} mm
***** castor-GATERootToCastor :: An error occurred while trying to process mac file for cylindrical system: /home/vgate/Desktop/myPET/myPET_mac/geometry.mac
***** Exit function called. Abort with code 1.

Is there any workaround this problem other having to hard code the variables as numbers?

Thanks a lot for your help!
Philipp

2

Hi Philipp,

There is unfortunately no work-around, the converter doesn’t work with aliases as it recover specific macro command and try to directly convert the provided value. Actually it would be complicated to make it compatible with aliases as in practice they are often defined in other files.

So indeed you will have to provide the variables as numbers, sorry for that!

Best,
Thibaut