Development of fast (sub-minute) micro-tomography

Abstract

An x-ray fast micro-tomography system was developed at medical and imaging beamline BL20B2 in SPring-8. We attempted a "continuous rotation method" whereby the sample keeps rotating in the beam during the measurement. The image acquisitions are synchronized with the trigger pulses branched from the stepper motor controller. An electron multiplier (EM)-CCD camera (C9100-02, 1000×1000pixels, 30 fps, 8 μm/pixel, Hamamatsu Photonics) and beam-monitor AA40P (Hamamatsu Photonics) were used as an image detector. The effective pixel size of the detector was 4.9 μm/pixel and the spatial resolution was about 15 μm. The total measurement time for 900 projections has been reduced to 36 s. The reconstruction time was also reduced using GPGPU and SSD system. Using these techniques, preliminary experiment for 4-D (time resolved 3-D) micro-imaging has also been performed. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.