3D Printing

Phantom development for hybrid MRI/PET

About the project

Phantom measurements for PET/MRI hybrid imaging, which combines MRI soft tissue morphological imaging with PET functional imaging, are of strong interest for improving, tuning and analyzing the performance of the scanners and can be used as a ground truth for method development and evaluation in attenuation and motion correction, image reconstruction and general image quality assessment. However, creating multimodal phantoms for use in simultaneous acquisition of PET and MRI remains challenging. The image contrast in PET is caused by radiotracer distribution, and in MRI by proton relaxation times. The materials used in one modality might produce strong artifacts in images from the other modality, or might even be completely invisible.

Methodological aspects

We examine materials, compositions and construction options using 3D printing, to build a PET phantom with tissue equivalent properties for MRI. We operate a KISS200 3D printer with dual extruder, optimized for printing experimental materials.

Funding

This project was funded in part by the Palestinian-German Science Bridge.

Presentation of my PhD Student Lotfi Talalwa during the PGSB Fellows and Alumni Award Competition 2020, awarded with “Best presentation for PhD Candidate”

Partners

• Central Institute for Engineering, Electronics and Analytics -Engineering and Technology (ZEA-1), Forschungszentrum Jülich
• Palestine Technical University – Kadoorie (PTUK)
• Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH-Aachen)
• Imaging Core Facility (ICF), Forschungszentrum Jülich
• Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (JCNS), Forschungszentrum Jülich