Tri Minh Ngo1, George S. K. Fung2,
Benjamin M.W. Tsui1,2, Elliot McVeigh1, Daniel A.
Herzka1
1Department of Biomedical Engineering,
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States; 2Division
of Medical Imaging Physics, Department of Radiology, Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States
We present a framework which enables realistic 3-D digital phantoms of organs such as the brain and heart to be constructed from polyhedra which have an analytical Fourier transform. Using this framework and data provided by the 4-D eXtended CArdiac Torso (XCAT) phantom, we constructed an anatomically realistic 4-D phantom of the beating heart represented analytically in the k-space and image domains. We used the phantom to simulate motion artifacts observed in 3-D cine acquisitions at different temporal resolutions. This phantom provides a physiologically realistic gold standard permitting the exploration and optimization of acquisition, motion compensation, and reconstruction strategies.