![]() The talent segment is judged on originality, performance, and appearance. Ibrahim and Wood hope that this model will eventually be developed commercially and provide others with the ability to pursue research without relying on human testing.For the beachwear and formalwear competitions, the young men are judged on poise, presentation and appearance. "With our phantom head, we can test the safety of our imaging by putting probes inside of certain regions of the head and measuring the effects," said Ibrahim. "With MR imaging, the power from the RF exposure is transformed into heat in the patient's tissue, which can have detrimental effects on the patient's health, especially with implants if not monitored by the scanner" explained Wood. The phantom has many applications including testing to see if certain implants are able to go inside of an MRI or detecting the temperature rise in different tissues based on various RF instrumentation. Now that Wood has a fully printed anthropomorphic phantom head, she is able to assemble it and begin testing. "To help the model further mimic a real environment, we created filling ports on the prototype where we can deposit fluids that resemble various tissue types." "We used a plastic developed by DSM Somos for our printing material because it allowed us to create durable and detailed parts with a similar conductivity to the human body," said Wood. The next step was to print the prototype, which took three semesters to complete. According to Wood, these compartments help improve image accuracy by acting as a sort of "speed bump" for the field.Īfter the computational preparations, Wood used an MRI scanner to produce a 3-D-digital image of healthy male's head and ran her model through computer-aided design, which is software used to create, modify, analyze, and optimize a design. She started with a 3T MRI dataset of a healthy male, which she characterized by segmentation and broke into eight tissue compartments, a feature that differentiates her model from other basic phantom heads. Wood said, "EM numerical modeling has been a standard when analyzing these interactions, and we wanted to create a phantom that resembled the human form for use in validating the EM modeling, thereby providing a more realistic environment for testing."īefore Wood could print the 3-D structure, she had to do computational work to build the digital blueprint for the model. Researchers are currently using numerical simulations to study the effect of electromagnetic (EM) fields on biological tissues at varying frequencies. We use the device to analyze, evaluate, and calibrate the MRI systems and instrumentation before testing new protocols on human subjects." "We wanted to develop an anthropomorphic phantom head to help us better understand these issues by providing a safer way to test the imaging. "As you move from lower to higher fields, the images produced become less uniform and localized heating becomes more prevalent," explained Ibrahim. 7T ultrahigh field technology is a powerful tool, but unfortunately, there are a few setbacks that come with this type of imaging. ![]() "In the RF Research Facility, we use a whole-body 7 Tesla magnetic resonance imager (7T MRI), which is one of the strongest clinical human MRI devices in the world," said Ibrahim. Ibrahim envisioned designing a 3-D printed phantom head to use with the uniquely designed ultrahigh field technology in his lab. She began research in his lab, the Radiofrequency (RF) Research Facility, during her senior year and is now finishing her dissertation incorporating similar research as a graduate student in the Department of Bioengineering. Wood started her tenure at Pitt as an undergraduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering where she met Tamer Ibrahim, an associate professor of bioengineering.
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