Diffantom: Whole-Brain Diffusion MRI Phantoms Derived from Real Datasets of the Human Connectome Project

Diffantom is a whole-brain diffusion MRI (dMRI) phantom publicly available through the Dryad Digital Repository (doi:10.5061/dryad.4p080). The dataset contains two single-shell dMRI images, along with the corresponding gradient information, packed following the BIDS standard (Brain Imaging Data Structure, Gorgolewski et al., 2015). The released dataset is designed for the evaluation of the impact of susceptibility distortions and benchmarking existing correction methods. In this Data Report we also release the software instruments involved in generating diffantoms, so that researchers are able to generate new phantoms derived from different subjects, and apply these data in other applications like investigating diffusion sampling schemes, the assessment of dMRI processing methods, the simulation of pathologies and imaging artifacts, etc. In summary, Diffantom is intended for unit testing of novel methods, cross-comparison of established methods, and integration testing of partial or complete processing flows to extract connectivity networks from dMRI.