Phantom Modelling in Magnetic Resonance Imaging: An Overview of Materials for Simulating Tissue Relaxation Time (Review)

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Anthropomorphic phantoms are required to mimic the properties, geometry, or functions of human body tissues.Materials used for such models should realistically reproduce certain physical characteristics of tissues.The literature lacks comprehensive information on classes of compounds that can model the biological tissue characteristics required for realistic imaging in magnetic resonance scanning.The purpose of this work is to search for and analyze existing materials simulating t he times of spin-lattice (T1) and spin-spin (T2) relaxation to create MRI phantoms.The article considers the methods of making compositions for simulating the relaxation times of biological tissues.Formulations obtained from aqueous suspensions, hydroge ls are presented, as well as examples of realisation of compositions in 3D-printing.Hydrogel compositions have been shown to be capable of accurately reproducing the relaxation properties of various body tissues within the relaxation time range of 65 to 1663 ms.Phantoms made from agarose have lower production costs, their life can be extended with the introduction of special additives.It has been noted that agarose is a modifier of T2 relaxation time, even in compositions with other types of gelling agen ts.3D-printing technology significantly speeds up the phantom modeling process and allows you to efficiently design complex geometric figures both from common and affordable materials (polylactic acid, polymethylmethacrylate, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) and from specially developed multicomponent compositions.Based on the data studied, the authors selected materials and developed a phantom to control the parameters of quantitative MRI, and also tested it.Further work on the systematization of inform ation on the characteristics of tissue equivalent materials will optimize the work on the design and manufacture of phantoms for specific technical and clinical tasks.