A MRI phantom for cardiac perfusion simulation

This paper describes a realistic cardiac MR perfusion simulator; both the kinematic model of the perfusion process as well as breathing effects are described and a novel model for the AIF is proposed. Additionally the most common degradation factors involved in the MR image formation, such as those derived from parallel acquisition protocols, the presence of thermal noise and its correlation, the partial volume effect, the field inhomogeneity and the image saturation, are also incorporated into the simulation. Resulting images show a strong resemblance with natural images and perfusion curves obtained seem parallel to those that could be observed in a real setting.