Current clinical imaging techniques generally do not provide highly detailed information about the exact location of axonal injury, injury severity or the expected recovery of patients with traumatic brain injury.
High-Definition Fiber tractography is a new imaging modality that permits the direct visualization and quantification of the degree of axons damage, predicting the functional deficits due to traumatic axonal injury and loss of cortical projections. This imaging mode is based on diffusion technology. Being a new mode of imaging, its validation and quality control are essential.
The lack of a model phantom that mimics as close as possible the human brain is a current problem that makes it difficult to test, calibrate and validate these medical imaging techniques. Much of the research done in this area has a huge gap in key points such as the reproduced size limit of the fibers of the brain and in the rapid and straightforward reproducibility of phantoms. The fibrous materials have been the subject of study because of the similarities between them and the human axons.
Thus, in order to promote the validation and accuracy of High-Definition Fiber tractography and improve the mapping of the human brain, allowing the diagnosis of white matter lesions, it is necessary to develop similar structures to those of human brain by creating brain phantoms.
This project is being carried out within the framework of the PhD studies of the researcher Catarina Guise under the guidance of Raul Fangueiro and the co-supervision of Walter Schneider and João Miguel Nóbrega.
