Major and Classification
Electrical Engineering
Faculty Mentor
Krishna S. Nayak, Ph.D.
Department
Viterbi: Electrical Engineering
McNair Project
“Flexible Dynamic 2-D Cardiac Phantoms for Evaluating MRI Data Acquisition and Reconstruction Methods”
Project Abstract
Phantoms in the imaging science refer to computer generated images often used to evaluate the performance of imaging methods. These images are usually made up of geometric shapes that mimic the shape and motion of imaged objects. They are useful to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research due to there being a large influx of data acquisition and image reconstruction methods that aim to accelerate MRI, which is conventionally believed to be slow. However, most existing phantoms are static images while one of the harder problems is imaging of dynamic bodies such as the heart. This paper proposes a pipeline for creating flexible, dynamic cardiac phantoms which researchers could potentially use to simulate their image reconstruction and data acquisition strategies for dynamic data. These simulations could act as a reliable benchmark to help discern flaws in these strategies, such as the appearance of image artifacts, and thus make the evaluation and comparison of methods easier. The cardiac phantoms created accurately simulate cardiac motion as well as structure