Abstract #0649

Microstructural characterization and validation of a 3D printed phantom for diffusion MRI

Farah N. Mushtaha¹, Tristan K. Kuehn ^1,2, John Moore ³, Corey A. Baron^1,3,4, and Ali R. Khan^1,2,3,4,5

¹Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping, Robarts Research Institute, London, ON, Canada, ²Biomedical Engineering, Western University, London, ON, Canada, ³Imaging Research Laboratories, Robarts Research Institute, London, ON, Canada, ⁴Medical Biophysics, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, London, ON, Canada, ⁵The Brain and Mind Institute, London, ON, Canada

Validating diffusion MRI (dMRI) representations and models of brain tissue is challenging because there is no reference ground-truth for in vivo scans. We propose a form of 3D printed phantoms as a flexible paradigm for investigating and validating microstructural indices and crossing fibres that is reproducible with inexpensive materials. As a proof of concept, we obtained multishell dMRI data in samples with varying crossing angles and printing parameters, and investigated the performance of constrained spherical deconvolution to extract diffusion parameters that accurately describe the crossing fibre bundles. We also investigated the effect of printing parameters on the phantoms’ microstructural anisotropy.

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