MO-D-141-10: Development of 4D XCAT Pediatric Reference Phantoms for Multi-Modality Imaging Research and Optimization.

PURPOSE: A set of 4D Extended Cardiac-Torso (XCAT) pediatric reference phantoms were created for multimodality imaging research, which have highly detailed whole-body anatomies, including cardiac and respiratory functions. Models were created for newborn, 1-year, 5-year, 10-year, and 15-year old males and females capturing the anatomical variations of childhood development. METHODS: The initial anatomy of each phantom was obtained from the Duke University PET-CT database. The major organs and structures for each phantom were segmented from the corresponding data using semiautomatic and manual segmentation. 3D Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) surfaces were fitted to the segmented data. Arms and legs were manually attached using scaled versions of the original XCAT adult male and female phantoms. Some patient datasets had incomplete skulls; skullcaps were manually matched to complete the skulls of these datasets. A multichannel large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (MC-LDDMM) algorithm was used to calculate the transform from a template XCAT phantom to the target patient model, which filled in unsegmented structures within the target phantom and implemented the 4D cardiac and respiratory models in the new anatomy. Organ weights were matched to the 50th percentile ICRP publication 89 values within 5%. RESULTS: A reference set of 10 pediatric phantoms were created with thousands of anatomical structures and cardiac and respiratory motions. These phantoms can be combined with existing simulation packages to simulate realistic imaging data. The phantoms provide a valuable tool to investigate radiation dose and image quality optimization. CONCLUSION: The development of patient-derived pediatric computational phantoms is useful in providing variable anatomies for simulation. Future work will expand this 10-phantom base to a host of pediatric phantoms representative of the public at large. This can provide a means to evaluate and improve pediatric imaging devices and to optimize CT protocols in terms of image quality and radiation dose.

Duke Scholars

Author Ehsan Samei Radiology