Quality assessment of magnetic resonance stereotactic localization for Gamma Knife radiosurgery

Artifacts in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may lead to anatomical distortion and inaccurate stereotactic coordinates. A special phantom for MRI and computed tomography (CT) was built to test the quality and precision of the two neuroradiological procedures. The phantom is fixed with the Leksell frame, and it has 15 orthogonal markers visible by CT and MRI techniques. The coordinates of the markers were calculated first on the CT scans and then on MR images. Two groups of different distortions were analysed: artifacts depending on the frame and its components and artifacts depending on the MR unit and image characteristics. A good target-coordinate correlation was found between CT and MRI in the axial plane, while in the coronal plane there was always a small error. This error is not constant, but changes from test to test, consequently it is hard to reform the image.