MOBY Phantom 的使用

使用phantom进行simulate之前，应该弄懂几个问题：

1. How to use the 4D NCAT and MOBY software to produce phantoms of the human and mouse, respectively.
2. How to simulate varying anatomies, motions, and diseased states with the software.
3. How to combine the phantoms with models for the imaging process to simulate imaging data of different modalities.

Medical imaging simulation is a powerful tool for characterizing, evaluating, and optimizing medical imaging devices and techniques. A vital aspect of simulation is to have a realistic phantom or model of the subject's anatomy.Based on state-of-the-art computer graphics techniques, the 4D NURBS-based Cardiac-Torso (NCAT) and 4D Mouse Whole-Body (MOBY) phantoms provide realistic models of the human and mouse anatomy and physiology for imaging studies. Both phantoms, when combined with accurate models for the imaging process, are capable of providing a wealth of realistic imaging data from subjects with various anatomies and motions (caridac and respiratory) in health and disease. With this ability, the phantoms have enormous potential to study the effects of anatomical, physiological, physical, and instrumentational factors on medical and small animal imaging and to research new instrumentation, image acquisition strategies, image processing and reconstruction methods and image visualization and interpretation techniques. The 4D NCAT and MOBY phantom software is distributed free-of-charge to academic institutions and is widely used in imaging research. The NCAT has been distributed to more than 300 academic users around the world while the newly released MOBY phantom is used by over 100 academic sites and continues to gain popularity. Both phantoms are also licensed to several commercial medical imaging companies.

phantom软件下载： http://www.bme.unc.edu/~wsegars/phantom.html

MOBY phantom: Each voxel value in the phantom  image is a 4 byte floating point number. To change the type of output produced by the MOBY program, the mphan_output_bin.c file can be modified. The phantoms are output with the given basename output_name. Phantom files with the extension _act are activity phantoms while those with the extension _atn are attenuation coefficient phantoms. The general_parameter_file contains numerous parameters to define the phantoms produced by the program. This includes parameters to define voxel size, motion, variations in anatomy, radionuclide uptake ratios for the activity phantoms, photon energy to define attenuation coefficients, ect.

W.P. Segars, B.M.W. Tsui, E.C. Frey, G.A. Johnson, and S.S. Berr, "Development of a 4D digital mouse 
phantom for molecular imaging research", Molecular Imaging & Biology, Vol. 6, Issue 3, p. 149-159, 2004.