Simulation of 4D spectral-spatial EPR images

Electron paramagnetic resonance imaging (EPRI) can be modeled by the forward projection of a 4D synthetic spectral- spatial phantom. We developed a simulation tool for EPRI and carried out a quantitative comparison between simulation and experiment, focusing on the signal and noise characteristics. The signal height in the simulation was compared to that in the experimental projections at gradients of different magnitudes and directions. We investigated the noise power spectrum of an EPR imager and incorporated it into the simulation. The signal and noise modeling of the simulation achieved the same performance as the EPR imager. Using this simulation, various sampling schemes were tried to find an optimized parameter set under the customized noise model of this EPR imager. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.