Development of a digital unrestrained mouse phantom with non-periodic deformable motion

We describe a method to generate a digital phantom of an unrestrained rodent that incorporates non-periodic motion with deformation. The phantom is represented by a deformable point cloud with time-dependent point coordinates, activity and attenuation. Motion is simulated by applying time-varying mesh deformation operators to the point cloud. To compare the simulated motion to the motion of a live rodent, the behavior of an unrestrained mouse was recorded using a depth camera, and the kinematic parameters of motion were measured. To generate simulated coincidence data, the phantom is voxelized and used in the Monte-Carlo emission simulation. The combined emission and motion data can be used for the development and validation of the image reconstruction algorithms with deformable motion correction.