Mechanically Powered Motion Imaging Phantoms: Proof of Concept
This addresses the need for simple and affordable motion phantoms in medical imaging, though it is incremental as it builds on existing phantom concepts with a new mechanical approach.
The paper tackled the problem of expensive and bulky motion imaging phantoms by designing mechanically powered phantoms using mainsprings and elastic bands, resulting in consistent and reproducible angular velocity measurements with small errors in MRI and US imaging.
Motion imaging phantoms are expensive, bulky and difficult to transport and set-up. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a simple approach to the design of multi-modality motion imaging phantoms that use mechanically stored energy to produce motion. We propose two phantom designs that use mainsprings and elastic bands to store energy. A rectangular piece was attached to an axle at the end of the transmission chain of each phantom, and underwent a rotary motion upon release of the mechanical motor. The phantoms were imaged with MRI and US, and the image sequences were embedded in a 1D non linear manifold (Laplacian Eigenmap) and the spectrogram of the embedding was used to derive the angular velocity over time. The derived velocities were consistent and reproducible within a small error. The proposed motion phantom concept showed great potential for the construction of simple and affordable motion phantoms