American RSD striatum head and skull cutting phantom

USARSD RS‐900 Striatal Head and Skull Cutting Phantom                                                        

Overview 

Striatal uptake quantitativeImage quality evaluation and assurance

Striatal phantom usePET or SPECT optimizes quantitative imaging of patients. This phantom is based on a standard RSD head with a skull cutout to allow easy insertion or removal of the braincase. The nasal cavity and maxillary sinus are filled with foam, with a mass density of 0.23 g/cc.

The braincase has five compartments that can be filled separately: the left and right caudate nuclei, the left and right putamen, and the rest of the brain. This allowed obtaining different caudate to putamen ratios and different striatum to background ratios; this also allowed for the examination of differences in left and right striatal activity. The volume of the braincase is approximately1260ml. The volumes of the caudate nucleus and putamen are 5.4 ml and 6.0 ml respectively.。

Refillable Exterior Markers: A set of refillable capsules are provided as exterior markers. Capsules can be filled with a radioactive solution and attached to the phantom's outer surface. It can then be imaged usingSPECT or PET mode to compare image registration techniques.

Quantification of striatal uptake is not straightforward as it depends on many factors, including the type of radionuclide used (Tc-99m, I-123 or F-18), imaging factors (such as collimator type, scattering and attenuation amounts) and image processing parameters (such as scattering and attenuation correction techniques, type of reconstruction filter, slice thickness, region of interest size and its location).

In normal subjects, the head of the putamen and caudate nucleus is a small structure with typical dimensions in the axial plane.7-15mm (comparable to system resolution). Since partial volume effects are more important for objects with dimensions smaller than twice the system resolution, the choice of imaging and reconstruction parameters is critical in calculating the striatal-to-occipital ratio used to measure relative uptake in the brain's striatum.

 Model description