This tool was developed to support and assist researchers with new technological advances in the field of medical imaging. This toolkit generates simultaneously 120kVp CT scans 0.35T MR images that closely resemble human medical images, from a desired XCAT phantom geometry.
This is a toolkit for rapidly generating simultaneously realistic CT scans and low-field MR images of the abdominal region, based on real patient data, while employing an XCAT phantom geometry of the user's choice. This tool was developed in MATLAB, and it requires a user-defined XCAT phantom geometry as input. The developed script generates simultaneously realistic 120keV CT scans and 0.35T MR images based on real patient data. The app generates two new sets of simulated images, one with Hounsfield U and another with MR intensities in DICOM format. The noise within both image modalities was assumed to be Gaussian, and therefore it follows a normal distribution, where the mean values and standard deviation values are based on patient images. The toolkit requires a simulated XCAT phantom for a simulated radionuclide energy of 120keV. Additionally, the simulated XCAT phantom must have a pixel width of 0.1cm and the selected start slice, and end slice must encompass only the abdominal and lower thoracic area of the phantom. The user will need to have MATLAB software in order to run the toolkit. Be sure to have the XCAT phantom in the same folder as the "CT_MRLsimulator.mlapp" file. When running the toolkit, the user will need to select the XCAT file of choice and provide a patient first name, patient family name, and patient ID for the simulated medical images. Please do not add space nor any special characters (i.e. *, & % ? / _ - + () {} [] #) when choosing patient information. Additionally, the user will have to provide the following information regarding their simulated XCAT phantom: simulated slice thickness, number of slices, number of rows, and number of columns.