Design of an Image Fusion Phantom for a Small Animal microPET/CT Scanner Prototype

Two separate microtomography systems recently developed at Instituto de Fisica, UNAM, produce anatomical (microCT) and physiological images (microPET) of small animals. In this work, the development and initial tests of an image fusion method based on fiducial markers for image registration between the two modalities are presented. A modular Helix/Line‐Sources phantom was designed and constructed; this phantom contains fiducial markers that can be visualized in both imaging systems. The registration was carried out by solving the rigid body alignment problem of Procrustes to obtain rotation and translation matrices required to align the two sets of images. The microCT/microPET image fusion of the Helix/Line‐Sources phantom shows excellent visual coincidence between different structures, showing a calculated target‐registration‐error of 0.32 mm.