Heterogenous Mouse Phantom with Water Tumor Model for Ionizing Imaging Machines

Phantoms are important devices in the medical imaging field. They are useful in the calibration of medical imaging devices and can be used in the detection of diseases and tumors under the imaging modalities. Phantoms mimic the real tissues of human or animal to give a realistic outcome. Currently, most of the existing phantoms are homogeneous phantoms that lack the anatomical structure of real tissues. Thus, this paper aims to design a heterogeneous mouse phantom with mimicking materials to the human tissue properties due to high genomic similarity between mouse and human. The phantom consists of skin shell, soft tissue, skeleton, liver, pancreas, and water content tumor. The tissue mimicking materials (TMMs) were selected based on their similarity to the real tissue properties. The mass attenuation coefficient (MAC), effective atomic number (Z
eff
), and electron density (N
e
) parameters of the chosen materials were calculated to assure the similarity to the real tissues, from International Commission on Radiation Units (ICRU). The results for all these parameters show a great similarity and validate these materials. The maximum errors are 5% and 1.4% for Z
eff
and N
e
, respectively. For MAC, all tissues reflect an excellent agreement over a wide range of energy.