ECR 2012 - SS505/B0372 - Digital Perfusion Phantoms for software validation

Digital perfusion phantoms and their use in perfusion validation.
The researchers showed comparable perfusion maps with totally diffferent definition of artery and vein location. Even completely misplaced locations resulted in an acceptable looking perfusion map using commercial software.
To allow calibration of perfusion software they developed the digital perfusion phantom. They start from the wanted perfusion map and produce the DICOM images that correspond to this map.
The presenter showed that the patterns generated in the simulated, simple DICOM images are not exactly right and very different when comparing different software packages. In an example where they overlapped their simulated map on the anatomical image strange highlighted regions appeared in one software system that should not be there. They also tested some freeware from the web and those packages provided even worse results.
The authors concluded that 'processing DPP perfusion sequence with any perfusion software of choice, and comparing the results to the expected DPP patterns provide a robust and straightforward way to control the quality of perfusion analysis, software, and protocols'