Design of a digital phantom of the neonatal brain.

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a 3D digital phantom of the neonatal brain. Commonly used digital brain phantoms (e.g. BrainWeb) are based on adults' brains. With the increasing interest in computer aided analysis of neonatal Magnetic Resonance (MR) images, it becomes necessary to create a special digital phantom for neonatal brains. This is because of the pronounced differences not only in size but more important in geometrical proportions of different brain tissues in adults and neonates and the additional need to subdivide the white matter of neonatal brains into two different types. Thus, the here created neonatal brain phantom consists of 6 different tissue types: scalp, skull, gray matter, myelinated and non-myelinated white matter and cerebrospinal fluid. Every voxel has a vector consisting of 6 probabilities of being part of one of these six tissues. The digital brain phantom will be used for simulation of tomographic images of the newborns' head and may serve as well as an evaluation data set for comparison of analysis methods for neonatal MR images, e.g. segmentation/registration algorithms, providing the possibility of controlled degradation of image data.