A new dynamic renal phantom and its application to scintigraphic studies for pixel basis functional radionuclide imaging

Various phantoms have been proposed in order to simulate the physical structures of human organs, such as those used in computerized brain tomography. Studying the functional behaviour of kidney by means of functional imaging techniques suffers from a lack of dynamic renal phantom for simulation. In this study a new dynamic renal phantom (DRP) is proposed and the first test results are reported which demonstrate the significance of deconvolution analysis in scintigraphy. The main idea in the construction of our DRP involves the filtration of chemical substances from the blood by flowing it through coiled tubes surrounded by semipermeable membranes. The DRP tests are performed with Technetium-99m (Tc-99m). The semipermeable membrane in the DRP passes Tc-99m, salts and small molecules but not blood cells and large protein molecules. The proposed DRP is tested using pixel basis renal functional radionuclide imaging techniques and promising results are obtained.