An experimental cone-beam micro-CT system for small animal imaging

An experimental cone-beam Micro-CT system for small animal imaging is presented in the paper. The system is designed to obtain high-resolution anatomic information and will be integrated with our bioluminescence tomography system. A flat panel X-ray detector (CMOS technology with a column CsI scintillator plate, 50 micron pixel size, 120 mm × 120 mm photodiode area) and a micro-focus X-ray source (13 to 40 μm of focal spot size) are used in the system. The object (mouse or rat) is placed on a three-degree (two translations and one rotation) programming stage and could be located to an accurate position in front of the detector. The large field of view (FOV) of the system allows us to acquire the whole body imaging of a normal mouse in one scanning which usually takes about 6 to 15 minutes. Raw data from X-ray detector show spatial variation caused by dark image offset, pixel gain and defective pixels, therefore data pre-processing is needed before reconstruction. Geometry calibrations are also used to reduce the artifacts caused by geometric misalignment. In order to accelerate FDK filtered backprojection method, we develop a reconstruction software using GPU hardware in our system. System spacial resolution and image uniformity and voxel noise have been assessed and mouse reconstruction images are illuminated in the paper. Experiment results show that this system is suitable for small animal imaging.