What is it about?
3D printers actually have many applications, some of them are related to biomedical applications. Nowadays is important to take advantage from these technology, that is we are doing, using 3D printers to develop phantoms to be used with MRI sytstems, specially with ultra low field MRI systems, that are trainging equipments for students.
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Photo by Tom Claes on Unsplash
Why is it important?
New Ultra-Low Field MRI (ULFMRI) systems, are being created as a new alternative to substitute superconductive systems, and they operate in a range of few micro Tesla. Field inhomogeneities are one of the main limitations of ULFMRI resulting in a poor image quality and low signal to noise ratio (SNR). There is a need to improve image assessment, using phantoms in which we can appreciate at least good borders in the acquired image. These are objects built to simulate T1 relaxation times of tissues. Besides, they are helpful to analyze different imaging parameters in an MRI System, such as Signal-to-noise Ratio (SNR), ghosting, signal uniformity, spatial resolution, geometric distortion, signal stability, among others.
Perspectives
The use of printed phantoms using these kind of technology is importante because allos to choose whatever shape characteristic that we want. If the segmentation is good enough, it could be printed a heart, a brain, a liver, etc. This can help us to ensure that the contours from our phantoms can be appreciated with the imaging system, which can lead us to improve system’s hardware and imaging processing techniques for academic and research purposes. This allow students, to trains with the image acquisitions systems and implement more sofisticated phantom for differentes case of study.
Sergio Solis-Najera
Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Development of anatomical phantoms for an ultra-low field magnetic resonance imaging system, January 2021, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0051143.
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