A Simple Isotropic Phantom for Diffusional Kurtosis Imaging

Els Fieremans¹, Antonio Pires¹, Jens H. Jensen¹

Heat-treated heavy dairy cream is shown to have a diffusion coefficient and a diffusional kurtosis similar to values for in vivo brain and may therefore serve as a practical and inexpensive phantom for testing diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI) protocols intended for neuroimaging applications. A feature of the phantom is that the fat/water shift may be exploited to provide a nontrivial consistency check. This phantom may be particularly useful as a calibration reference for multicenter and longitudinal investigations.