Synchrotron-based micro-CT of in-situ biological basic functional units and their integration

Use of synchrotron generated x-ray for micro-CT is particularly powerful for several reasons. These include the high x-ray flux which permits short duration exposure and hence scan durations, the narrow bandwidth of the x-ray energy which permits quantitative CT imaging with high accuracy of the measured attenuation coefficient and the fact that the x-ray photon energy can be adjusted allows element selective imaging. Another advantage is that the radiation is close to parallel so that the tomographic image reconstruction process is facilitated. On the other hand, synchrotron-based micro-CT imaging does have the limitation of a rather small field of view being illuminated. This means that specimens larger than the field of view also create problems for the conventional 'global' tomographic image reconstruction algorithms. Fortunately, recently developed 'local' reconstruction algorithms can, in large measure, overcome this limitation of the synchrotron generated x-ray field.