Phantom Material with Biological Composition for Muscle Equivalent Radiofrequency, Thermal and Magnetic Resonance Properties

As research and development in the field of electro-magnetic medical devices increases, so does the need for proper validation and calibration. This is typically done using tissue mimicking models known as phantoms. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is becoming increasingly popular for electro-magnetic device modelling and validation. Currently, there is no muscle phantom material that matches the properties of muscle tissue in MRI, electromagnetic and thermal properties. This study presents a novel muscle phantom made from inexpensive, household materials, that can approximate all three. Phantoms consist of water, agar-agar, peanut oil, and protein powder. These ingredients are used to model healthy, obese and dehydrated muscle tissue. While the phantoms exhibit behavior similar to those in existing literature, their values are consistently lower. We expect that future improvement is possible by reducing the protein and oil content, to bring the values even closer to the muscle tissue properties reported in literature.