Big Brain Digital Phantom Population

Here we develop a digital brain phantom population (Big Brain) for radionuclide imaging research in Parkinson’s Disease. The phantom population is generated based on T1-weighted MRI images with a voxel size of 1 mm. Users have the flexibility to set the activity distribution according to their requirements, making it suitable for both PET and SPECT simulations. The Big Brain digital phantom population is publicly available and can be downloaded via the following link: Big Brain

Sample 99mTc phantoms with different PD stages.

Features:

  • Three primary regions in DAT radionuclide images, i.e., the high-uptake striatum region, the medium-uptake brain background region including gray and white matter, and the no-uptake cold region including skull and cerebrospinal fluid are modeled. A total of 200 maps for each region are available. Note that all maps are aligned with a standard striatum atlas.
  • Realistic anatomical variations can be modeled by randomly pairing the striatum region with other 2 regions.
  • Activity distributions can be set based on the research interest of the users.
  • A sample of 200 PD phantoms modeling different PD stages with 99mTc-TRODAT-1 SPECT are also available.