Micro-CT Imaging System And Its Applications

Micro-CT system has played an imperative part in the evolution of imagingtechnology. It can obtain non-invasive and high-spatial-resolution in vivo or in vitroanatomic information with relatively low cost and convenient operation, which hasbeen used to the study of quantitative bone mineral density and trabecula analysis,vascular contrast, tumor monitoring, and can be combined with other modalities, suchas nuclear imaging and optical imaging, providing accurate detail information.The Micro-CT imaging technology and its applications have been worked anddemonstrated in this paper. The Micro-CT system design and main systemperformance indexes have been discussed and analyzed, and two Micro-CT systemswith different prototypal hardware components have been compared in the systemanalysis part. Applications of Micro-CT combined with Optical Molecular Imagingsystems and in-vitro imaging have been introduced in the other chapters.The main research of Micro-CT in multimodality systems, especially with OpticalMolecular Imaging systems, is to find an effective and convenient method of providingheterogeneous mouse anatomical information. Because of the too low contrast rate ofthe Micro-CT images and too expensive specific Micro-CT animal imaging contrastagents, a distinct intraperitoneal injection method using the common aiohexol contrastagent is presented to improve the contrast of the Micro-CT images, which not onlygreatly improves the contrast rate, but benefits the further manual or semi-manualmouse organs segmentations. At the same time, in order to reduce the mouse organsegmentation workload, organ approximation method based on the3D medical imageregistration and fusion has been studied, which helps to offer quick and convenientheterogeneous information.Using of Micro-CT in quantitative measuring of bone mineral density andtrabecula analysis, and tooth3D structure modeling and dental root canal preparationexperiments, are developed to demonstrate the applications of Micro-CT on in vitroimaging.