pt4: Phantom-4D, an open-source software tool for creating time-evolving 3D phantoms

Abstract

pt4, an open-source software tool to describe time-evolving phantoms is presented. pt4 allows users to create detailed time-evolving phantoms for testing novel 4D-CT reconstruction algorithms. Ground-truth volumes and simulated X-ray projections can be produced at arbitrary time-points during time-evolution and with customisable pixel dimensions, noise models, and X-ray source trajectories. Phantoms are built up from 3D primitives whose parameters and attenuation can be made arbitrary functions of time. This feature permits both complex continuous and discontinuous time-evolution necessary for thorough testing of 4D-CT reconstruction algorithms. Various phantoms built using pt4 are also presented to demonstrate the versatility of pt4 phantom description. pt4 is written in C++ and is highly parallelised leading to a performant implementation which is feasible to use for up to thousand-of-voxel volume pixel dimensions.