A high-resolution and large field-of-view micro-CT system is indispensable for the visualization of fine threedimensional (3-D) structures of a large specimen. Such a system drastically increases the overall number of effective sensor pixels. At SPring-8 over a decade ago, a micro-CT system based on a 10M-pixel CCD camera was developed for 3-D specimen imaging of centimeter-sized objects with approximately 7 μm spatial resolution. Subsequently, more recent studies have required systems with higher spatial resolution and a wider field-of-view. Detectors with spatial resolution of around 5 μm can visualize capillaries. However, such detectors make it extremely expensive to develop a new x-ray detector with several tens of megapixels in a conventional manner. Fortunately, dizzying advances in image sensor technology for consumer appliances have enabled the development of x-ray detectors with spatial resolution of around 5 μm using a commercial digital single-lens reflex camera fitted with a 36M-pixel CMOS image sensor for the visualization of fine 3-D structures of large human lung specimens. This paper describes a comparison of the performance offered by the new 36M-pixel micro-CT system and the 10M-pixel system.

Date Published: 31 October 2016
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 10020, Optoelectronic Imaging and Multimedia Technology IV, 1002005 (31 October 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2246186

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10020:
Optoelectronic Imaging and Multimedia Technology IV
Qionghai Dai; Tsutomu Shimura, Editor(s)