Novel Artificial Phantom for Studies of Anisotropic Diffusion in the Model Brain Tissue

Ezequiel Farrher¹, Joachim Kaffanke¹, Tony Stoecker¹, Farida Grinberg¹, N. Jon Shah^1,2

Diffusion-weighted MRI provides access to fibre pathways and structural characteristics in fibrous tissues such as white matter in the brain. Various factors such as restrictions, anisotropy, and compartmentalization imposed by the cellular microstructure cause a complexity of diffusion behaviour of water in the brain tissue. Therefore, it is important to develop artificial model systems with a reduced complexity in order to enable a better understanding of the relation between the experiments and the microstructure. In this work, we present a novel design for diffusion phantoms made of polyethylene fibres that exhibit sufficiently high anisotropy and a variation of fibre density within the same sample.