Diffusion Phantom Assessment in 3 Tesla MRI Scanner

Abstract

Purpose: Diffusion-Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DW-MRI) has been used extensively for the early detection of cerebral ischemia. Tissue-equivalent diffusivity phantoms can play a pivotal role in optimizing the existing imaging protocols used for DW-MRI or when examining the usefulness of novel pulse sequences for DW-MRI.The objective of this work was to build a spherical diffusion phantom which mimics the condition typically found in biological tissues.
Methods: To assess the quality control, we prepared Nickel-doped agarose/sucrose gels and to perform a quality control on MRI protocols, we designed a spherical phantom. The quality control protocol was applied on a 3 T clinical MRI system (Siemens) and T1, T2, and ADC maps were generated then calculated the average T1, T2, and ADC values.
Result: ADC measurement with Nickel-doped agarose/sucrose using an EPI DW-MRI protocol was very good. The T1, T2 and ADC measurement shows the relaxation and diffusion properties of this phantom is similar to the ones found in biological tissues especially in biological tissues such as fat tissue and air tissue boundaries.
Conclusion: Nickel-doped agarose/sucrose gels can be used as reference materials for MRI diffusion measurement. A phantom made of these material can be invaluable in optimizing DW-MRI.