Cone Beam Micro-CT System for Small Animal Imaging and Performance Evaluation

A prototype cone-beam micro-CT system for small animal imaging has been developed by our group recently, which consists of a microfocus X-ray source, a three-dimensional programmable stage with object holder, and a flat-panel X-ray detector. It has a large field of view (FOV), which can acquire the whole body imaging of a normal-size mouse in a single scan which usually takes about several minutes or tens of minutes. FDK method is adopted for 3D reconstruction with Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration. In order to reconstruct images with high spatial resolution and low artifacts, raw data preprocessing and geometry calibration are implemented before reconstruction. A method which utilizes a wire phantom to estimate the residual horizontal offset of the detector is proposed, and 1D point spread function is used to assess the performance of geometric calibration quantitatively. System spatial resolution, image uniformity and noise, and low contrast resolution have been studied. Mouse images with and without contrast agent are illuminated in this paper. Experimental results show that the system is suitable for small animal imaging and is adequate to provide high-resolution anatomic information for bioluminescence tomography to build a dual modality system.