This invention provides a phantom, or a test object, which includes anisotropic structures, which can be used to monitor DTI measures. The anisotropic structures include a plurality of water-filled capillaries, arranged in a predefined configuration. In addition to using the phantom for providing quality assurance (QA) measurements of DTI in a conventional manner, data scanned using a phantom of the present invention having simple, prolate geometry can be employed to synthesize ADC distributions that exhibit complicated behavior. The method of the present invention may be used for studying anatomically realistic diffusive behavior in tissue.
Unlike a typical DTI scan, the ADC measurements of the present invention are treated in a "reconstruction" phase as if the gradients were applied in different directions. If diffusion gradients are applied along particular directions, but the tensors are calculated assuming that the gradients were applied along different directions, the ADC distribution is modified and the associated tensor shape is modified. Following this method, the ADC values derived from a real-world distribution can be rearranged into a distribution of choice. Given a set of reconstruction directions, a judicious choice of acquisition directions for each reconstruction direction allows for the synthesis of any distribution.
Case ID: AURI #2007-042
IP status: Patent Issued