X-ray transmission microtomography facility at the National Synchrotron Light Laboratory

This work reports the feasibility of a nondestructive synchrotron radiation X-ray transmission imaging technique development at Brazilian synchrotron light source. The quality control image parameters (spatial and density resolution and noise) were available and tomography preliminaries were evaluated. Microtomograms of biomedical samples are presented. The tomographic system was mounted into the XRF beamline that uses a high intensity white beam with 12 keV effective energy, and maximum width and height equals to 11 mm and 1 mm, respectively. The detector used to collect the data was a 512-pixel EG&G Reticon linear array with width of 50 /spl mu/m (36 /spl mu/m of sensitivity length ) and cooled by a Peltier junction, causing the temperature falling down to 15/spl deg/C. The samples were placed over a computer controlled table with 0.5 degree angular resolution and turned around the center covering 360 degrees. To reconstruct the sample was used a parallel beam filtered backprojection algorithm.