Design and construction of a brain phantom to simulate neonatal MR images

This paper presents the design and construction of a 3D digital neonatal neurocranial phantom and its application for the simulation of brain magnetic resonance (MR) images. Commonly used digital brain phantoms (e.g. BrainWeb) are based on the adult brain. With the growing interest in computer-aided methods for neonatal MR image processing, there is a growing demand a digital phantom and brain MR image simulator especially for the neonatal brains. This is due to the pronounced differences between adult and neonatal brains not only in terms of size but also, more importantly, in terms of geometrical proportions and the need to subdivide white matter into two different tissue types in neonates. Therefore the neonatal brain phantom created in the here presented work consists of 9 different tissue types: skin, fat, muscle, skull, dura mater, gray matter, myelinated white matter, nonmyelinated white matter and cerebrospinal fluid. Each voxel has a vector consisting of 9 components, one for each of these nine tissue types. This digital phantom can be used to map simulated magnetic resonance signal intensities resulting in simulated MR images of the newborns head. These images with controlled degradation of the image data present a representative, reproducible data set ideal for development and evaluation of neonatal MRI analysis methods, e.g. segmentation and registration algorithms.