A Diffusion Hardware Phantom Looking Like a Coronal Brain Slice

Cyril Poupon¹, Laurent Laribiere¹, Gregory Tournier¹, Jeremy Bernard¹, Denis Fournier¹, Pierre Fillard¹, Maxime Descoteaux², Jean-Francois Mangin¹

Diffusion-weighted imaging has become an established technique to infer the micro-structure of the brain. Its more popular application, fiber tractography, is still the only possibility to infer in vivo the structural connectivity of the brain. Despite the plethora of tractography algorithms in the literature, it is almost impossible to validate them. In this work, we present a novel hardware phantom dedicated to the validation of HARDI models and tractography algorithms. Its geometry was designed to mimic a coronal slice location of a human brain, depicting a large set of specific configurations (crossings, kissings, splittings)