Fundamental Study on Molecular Imaging by Fluorescent X-Ray CT

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Fluorescent x-ray computed tomography (FXCT) that can detect and image a trace of non-radioactive imaging agent, e. g., iodine, in a biomedical subject at a high spatial resolution can be a novel molecular imaging modality. Presently, we are developing an FXCT system using synchrotron radiation as an x-ray source for in-vivo imaging brains of small animals such as mouse, rat, and so on. For the purpose, we must overcome the following two difficulties damaging an image-quality: One difficulty is that the number of projections is remarkably restricted due to the long data-acquisition time. In order to reduce the measurement time, we propose to eliminate unnecessary beam scans by adaptively and efficiently controlling the scanning according to the subject size. The other difficulty is that the measured data are contaminated by inevitable physical factors. Here, we propose data-processing methods to estimate reliable projections from raw data. The efficacies of the proposed methods are demonstrated using physical-phantom images and an in-vivo image of mouse brain, which were reconstructed from experimental data acquired in KEK, Japan.