Quantification of the strength and quality of the muscle, adipose tissue, and bone is important for the characterization of the effects of normal aging, age-related diseases, metabolic disorders and neuromuscular diseases. The cost, duration and risks of medical imaging trials may render the task of generating a sufficient high number of quality data for the training of systems for clinical trials and evaluations impracticable. In this work, we developed a model of the human mid-thigh with structural representation of its muscles, adipose tissue and bone anatomy, for use in virtual clinical studies. This is a simulation-based approach to optimizing medical imaging systems. We simulated thigh phantoms based on the OpenVCT software framework, originally designed for digital breast imaging studies. We designed and generated phantoms of mid-thigh anatomical structures representing normal anatomy. Exploiting the flexibility of the system, we were able to generate a controlled population for which we varied, separately, different anatomical structures. We simulated regional mid-thigh muscle area degeneration that is frequently observed in diabetes patients and quantified the structural changes relatively to a healthy anatomy. This framework also allows us to simulate variations of anatomical structures – hence serving as a system for advanced data augmentation that may be used for training machine learning-based diagnostic methods, simulating the effects of diseases, and designing clinical studies.
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