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StepBrain: A 3-Dimensionally Printed Multicompartmental Anthropomorphic Brain Phantom to Simulate PET Activity
Maria Agnese Pirozzi1, Valeria Gaudieri2, Anna Prinster3
1Department of Advanced Medical and Surgical Sciences, University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli," Naples, Italy; mariaagnese.pirozzi@unicampania.it.
None:
An innovative multicompartmental anatomic brain phantom (StepBrain) is described to simulate the in vivo tracer uptake of gray matter, white matter, and striatum, overcoming the limitations of currently available phantoms. Methods: StepBrain was created by exploiting the potential of fused deposition modeling 3-dimensional printing to replicate the real anatomy of the brain compartments, as modeled through ad hoc processing of healthy-volunteer MR images. Results: A realistic simulation of 18F-FDG PET brain studies, using target activity to obtain the real concentration ratios, was obtained, and the results of postprocessing with partial-volume effect correction tools developed for human PET studies confirmed the accuracy of these methods in recovering the target activity concentrations. Conclusion: StepBrain compartments (gray matter, white matter, and striatum) can be simultaneously filled, achieving different concentration ratios and allowing the simulation of different (e.g., amyloid, tau, or 6-fluoro-l-dopa) tracer distributions, with a potentially valuable role for multicenter PET harmonization studies.
