A High Spatial Resolution CT Scanner for Small Animal Imaging

We have built a micro-CT system that will be integrated with a small animal PET scanner. The components are: an X-ray source with a peak voltage of up to 60 kV, a power of 10 W and a focal spot size of 30 μm; a CCD coupled to CsI(Tl) scintillator, subdivided into 128×3072 square pixels, each with a size of 48 μm; stepping motors for the sample roto-translation; a PCI acquisition board; electronic boards to control and read-out the CCD. A program in Lab VIEW controls the data acquisition. Reconstruction algorithms have been implemented for fan-beam and cone-beam configurations. Images of a bar pattern have been acquired to evaluate the detector performance: the CTF curve has been extracted from the data, obtaining a value of 10 % at 5 lp/mm and about 3 % at 10 lp/mm. Tomographic acquisitions have been performed with a test phantom consisting of a Plexiglas cylinder, 3 cm in diameter, with holes ranging from 3 mm down to 0.6 mm in diameter, filled with different materials. The contrast resolution has been extracted from the reconstructed images: a value of 6 % (in water) for a cubic voxel size of 80 μm has been obtained.