Design and fabrication of a realistic anthropomorphic heterogeneous head phantom for MR purposes.

<h4>Objective</h4>The purpose of this study is to design an anthropomorphic heterogeneous head phantom that can be used for MRI and other electromagnetic applications.<h4>Materials and methods</h4>An eight compartment, physical anthropomorphic head phantom was developed from...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sossena Wood, Narayanan Krishnamurthy, Tales Santini, Shailesh B Raval, Nadim Farhat, John Andy Holmes, Tamer S Ibrahim
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2017-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0183168&type=printable
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Summary:<h4>Objective</h4>The purpose of this study is to design an anthropomorphic heterogeneous head phantom that can be used for MRI and other electromagnetic applications.<h4>Materials and methods</h4>An eight compartment, physical anthropomorphic head phantom was developed from a 3T MRI dataset of a healthy male. The designed phantom was successfully built and preliminarily evaluated through an application that involves electromagnetic-tissue interactions: MRI (due to it being an available resource). The developed phantom was filled with media possessing electromagnetic constitutive parameters that correspond to biological tissues at ~297 MHz. A preliminary comparison between an in-vivo human volunteer (based on whom the anthropomorphic head phantom was created) and various phantoms types, one being the anthropomorphic heterogeneous head phantom, were performed using a 7 Tesla human MRI scanner.<h4>Results</h4>Echo planar imaging was performed and minimal ghosting and fluctuations were observed using the proposed anthropomorphic phantom. The magnetic field distributions (during MRI experiments at 7 Tesla) and the scattering parameter (measured using a network analyzer) were most comparable between the anthropomorphic heterogeneous head phantom and an in-vivo human volunteer.<h4>Conclusion</h4>The developed anthropomorphic heterogeneous head phantom can be used as a resource to various researchers in applications that involve electromagnetic-biological tissue interactions such as MRI.
ISSN:1932-6203