Preliminary study for a water-paraffin based phantom in MRI quality assurance test

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners are widely used both for diagnostic purpose and in studies on material properties. As a consequence they play an important role in diagnosis of diseases and in materials investigations. MRI Quality assurance tests are mandatory to obtain and maintain optimal images during time, some institutional organizations have proposed requirements on MRI image quality even if there are no worldwide standardization procedures .The purpose of this study is to design a novel MRI phantom useful to evaluate basic image quality requirements: our phantom is designed, realized and tested in order to define specific image assurance protocols and tests. Moreover the developed device is low cost, reusable and can be filled with different MRI-compatible materials. In our application the phantom is filled with water and paraffin to compare contrast resolution and signal-to-noise ratio measurements for a same scanner. Tests have been performed on a 3T scanner with 7 different scansion settings. First experimental results are encouraging and confirm a previous theoretical investigation on the employed material characteristics. Therefore other tests and data are going to be collected for the future development and performance improvement of the device.