Reconstruction of high-resolution, multi-energy, X-ray computed tomography laboratory mouse images

A new X-ray computed tomography system is being developed to image laboratory mice for the purpose of phenotype screening and identification. This CT system allows simultaneous capture of several sets of sinogram data, each having a unique X-ray energy distribution, or bin. Due to varying numbers of photon counts within each energy bin, both traditional (filtered backprojection, or FBP) and statistical (maximum likelihood or ML) tomographic image reconstruction techniques have been applied to the energy-dependent sinogram data. Comparisons of reconstructed images using both algorithms on multi-energy (both high- and low-count) sinogram data are presented. Also, tissue contrast within the energy-dependent images is compared to known X-ray attenuation coefficients of soft tissue (e.g. muscle), bone, and fat.