SBIR Phase I: Platform-Independent Full-Body Computational Human Phantom

This SBIR Phase I project will create, develop, and disseminate a reputable and atomically-accurate, platform-independent computational human phantom. The computational phantom will include about 120 individual tissue parts in the form of finite-element triangular surface meshes with approximately 130,000 triangles total. Each tissue part will be extracted from the Visible Human Project-Female dataset of the National Library of Medicine. This open and free of charge research and education resource will be made for research applications to all universities and private entities. The phantom will be primarily intended for modeling MRI and cellphone safety, modern electromagnetic diagnostic and therapeutic tools, on-body and in-body antennas, wireless body sensors, biomedical microwave imaging, as well as tissue engineering and biomedical imaging. The phantom or its parts can be used in any of the leading commercial electromagnetic, acoustic, and thermal simulators, or in custom research applications. The phantom will possess a full set of topological characteristics necessary for cross-platform compatibility and computational efficiency. Each original tissue triangular surface mesh will be strictly 2-manifold or thin-shell (no non-manifold faces, no non-manifold vertices, no holes, and no self-intersections). No tissue mesh will have any triangular facets in contact with other tissue surfaces. There will always be a (small) gap between the distinct tissue surfaces. This gap will physically represent thin membranes separating distinct tissues. Numerically, it will correspond to an 'average body' container(s), which will enclose organs and tissues, and will guarantee compatibility between different Computer-aided design formats. Tissues will be created that are fully enclosed within each other, such as the white matter inside the gray matter, cancellous bone inside a cortical bone shell, etc. These tissues will also neither touch nor intersect. Each tissue triangular surface mesh will have nearly the same segmentation accuracy (resolution) and the minimum surface triangular mesh size allowed. The entire phantom and the individual tissue triangular surface meshes will be made available in binary, NASTRAN, PLY, and STL formats. The phantom will be augmented with a set of electromagnetic tissue properties covering the range from 1000 Hz to 60 GHz.