Implementation of interior micro-CT on a carbon nanotube dynamic micro-CT scanner for lower radiation dose

Micro-CT is a high-resolution volumetric imaging tool that provides imaging evaluations for many preclinical applications. However, the relatively high cumulative radiation dose from micro-CT scans could lead to detrimental influence on the experimental outcomes or even the damages of specimens. Interior micro-computed tomography (micro- CT) produces exact tomographic images of an interior region-of-interest (ROI) embedded within an object from truncated projection data. It holds promises for many biomedical applications with significantly reduced radiation doses. Here, we present our first implementation of an interior micro-CT system using a carbon nanotube (CNT) field-emission microfocus x-ray source. The system has two modes - interior micro-CT mode and global micro-CT mode, which is realized with a detachable x-ray beam collimator at the source side. The interior mode has an effective field-of-view (FOV) of about 10mm in diameter, while for the global mode the FOV is about 40mm in diameter. We acquired CT data in these two modes from a mouse-sized phantom, and compared the reconstructed image qualities and the associated radiation exposures. Interior ROI reconstruction was achieved by using our in-house developed reconstruction algorithm. Overall, interior micro-CT demonstrated comparable image quality to the conventional global micro-CT. Radiation doses measured by an ion chamber show that interior micro-CT yielded significant dose reduction (up to 83%).