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Updated: Sep 5, 2025
Multimodal 3D Printing of Phantoms to Simulate Biological Tissue
Published on: January 11, 2020
Additively manufactured test phantoms for mimicking soft tissue radiation attenuation in CBCT using Polyjet
Sepideh Hatamikia1, Gunpreet Oberoi2, Anna Zacher3
1Austrian Center for Medical Innovation and Technology (ACMIT), Wiener Neustadt, Austria; Research center for Medical Image Analysis and Artificial Intelligence (MIAAI), Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, Danube Private University, Krems, Austria; Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Objectives:
To develop and validate a simple approach for building cost-effective imaging phantoms for Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) using a modified Polyjet additive manufacturing technology where a single material can mimic a range of human soft-tissue radiation attenuation.
Materials And Methods:
Single material test phantoms using a cubic lattice were designed in 3-Matic 15.0 software . Keeping the individual cubic lattice volume constant, eight different percentage ratio (R) of air: material from 0% to 70% with a 10% increment were assigned to each sample. The phantoms were printed in three materials, namely Vero PureWhite, VeroClear and TangoPlus using Polyjet technology. The CT value analysis, non-contact profile measurement and microCT-based volumetric analysis was performed for all the samples.
Results:
The printed test phantoms produced a grey value spectrum equivalent to the radiation attenuation of human soft tissues in the range of -757 to +286 HU on CT. The results from dimensional comparison analysis of the printed phantoms with the digital test phantoms using non-contact profile measurement showed a mean accuracy of 99.07 % and that of micro-CT volumetric analysis showed mean volumetric accuracy of 84.80-94.91%. The material and printing costs of developing 24 test phantoms was 83.00 Euro.
Conclusions:
The study shows that additive manufacturing-guided macrostructure manipulation modifies successfully the radiographic visibility of a material in CBCT imaging with 1 mm3 resolution, helping customization of imaging phantoms.
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