MGH Angel 001

If you use the material below, please cite aaaa

Download the latest version of the STL and Inventor files here.

Front and back halves of the skull part

Front and back halves of the outer compartment

This phantom was created based on the automatic segmentation of a human subject. Surfaces were created using the marching cube algorithm ("isosurface" function in Matlab) and were simplified using Meshlab ("Laplacian Smooth" and "Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation" functions).

The phantom consists of two nested compartments. The inner compartment is the skull, which is 3D printed as two matching parts (since bone has a low conductivity, plastic somewhat mimics this material). These parts, especially the front half of the skull, contain many complex details and therefore should be printed using dissoluble support material. The skull contain an inner compartment to be filled using a brain-like gel (this brain compartment is uniform and does not mimic the grey and white matter nor the CSF-filled ventricles).

The outer compartment is an outer shell in which the skull compartment slides (there are 3 sliding groves and another contact in the back of the skull). When assembling the skull compartment inside the outer shell, you should make sure to add epoxy in the sliding grooves to make sure that the skull is secure inside the outer shell.

Initially the phantom was designed to include some air cavity that would create a realstic B0 offset pattern in the frontal lobe region. THis is the reason why the nose is covered by arcs of plastic. However, the B0 map of this phantom was not accurate since it only contained the nasal cavity (for accurate B0 modeling, the whole sinus cavity needs to be modeled including air cavities that go as high up as below the eyes). If you want a phantom with a correct B0 distribution, check out the MGH "Angel 002" phantom instead.