A 5D anthropomorphic numerical phantom for respiratory-gated parametric imaging simulation studies in dynamic emission tomography

Dynamic image acquisition protocols are increasingly used in emission tomography, for drug development and clinical research. As such, there is a need for computational phantoms accurately describing both the spatial as well as temporal distribution of the radiotracer, taking into account periodic and non-periodic physiological processes during the course of the acquisition, such as tracer kinetics and respiratory motion. To this end, we developed a new 5D anthropomorphic digital phantom for accurate parametric imaging simulation studies in emission tomography. The proposed phantom is comprised of 3 spatial and 2 temporal dimensions and is based on high spatial and temporal information derived from 4D MR data. The envisaged applications of this digital phantom include development and evaluation of motion correction and image reconstruction algorithms in PET and SPECT, development of protocols and methods for tracer and drug development and new kinetic parameter estimation algorithms amongst others. Example applications are shown in parametric [¹⁸F]FDG and [¹⁵O]H₂O PET imaging.