Design of a new heart phantom for cardiac MRI simulations

Abstract

Magnetic Resonance Imaging offers challenging image reconstruction problems. Nowadays, the goal is to reduce the acquisition scan-time for a given quality of reconstruction. The applications are for instance cardiac dynamic MRI, where a 2 or 3-D image of the heart is acquired trought time.

Sophisticated algorithms for reconstruction are developped, that need simulation phantom for first validation.

The idea of this project was to design a software phantom for cardiac MRI. We studied the 2-D static case, building a phantom, inspired from NCAT, that is parametrized by ellipses and polygons. The design allows to analytically compute the measurements from the continuous physical model.

We extended the technique to non-homogeneous receiving coil, which allows to simulate parallel MRI experiments.

The outlook would be to extend this software phantom to 3-D and integrate a motion model for dynamic simulations.

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