How Do You Make a Realistic Lung?

Fun Fact: Due to our expertise in fabricating items with a wide range of materials, sometimes we have the opportunity to collaborate on research projects outside of prosthetics. 

Patient motion during PET scans can be a major detriment to image quality, leading to quantification errors and radiologists potentially missing malignant lesions. In order to study these problematic effects and potentially mitigate them through motion correction algorithms, anthropomorphic phantoms with accurate anatomy and realistic motion are needed. 

Anthropomorphic, or humanoid, phantoms are essentially model patients made of specific materials that simulate human tissue in their shape and their interactions with the gamma radiation of the PET scan. While anatomically accurate phantoms exist, none have been created with the realistic movement of a human, which makes them ineffective for motion studies. This is what we set out to do. The phantom can be scanned many times, unlike a real patient, and under precisely known and controlled conditions such as lung trajectory, breathing rate, and breathing tidal volume. This allows new scanning methods and algorithms to be developed and rigorously tested as was previously impossible, thus hopefully leading to better quantification and tumour detection in PET for the future.