Magnitude and effects of X-ray scatter of a cone-beam micro-CT for small animal imaging

We have developed a micro-CT system to provide high-resolution and anatomic information to combine with a microPET® R4 system. This study was to evaluate the magnitude and effects of scatter for low kVp X-ray in this cone-beam micro-CT system. Slit collimators were used to simulate fan-beam micro-CT for comparison. The magnitudes of X-ray scatter were measured using the beam-stop method and were estimated by polynomial-fitting extrapolation to 0 mm size of stoppers. The scatter-to-primary ratio at center of the cone-beam system were 45% and 20% for rat and mouse phantoms, respectively, and were reduced to 5.86% and 4.2% in fan-beam geometric setup. The effects of X-ray scatter on image uniformity and contrast ratio were evaluated also. The uniformity response was examined by the profile of the reconstructed image. The degrees of “cupping” in the fan-beam and cone-beam conditions were 1.75% and 3.81%, respectively, in rat phantom. A contrast phantom consisting of four inserts with physical densities similar to that of acrylic was used for measuring the effect of X-ray scatter on image contrast. Contrast ratios of the inserts and acrylic in cone-beam setup degraded 36.9% in average compared with fan-beam setup. A tumor-bearing mouse was scanned by the micro-CT system. The tumor-to-background contrast ratios were measured to be 0.331 and 0.249, respectively, with fan-beam and cone-beam setups.