Preliminary experimental results from a MARS Micro-CT system

The Medipix All Resolution System (MARS) system is a commercial spectral/multi-energy micro-CT scanner designed and assembled by the MARS Bioimaging, Ltd. in New Zealand. This system utilizes the state-of-the-art Medipix photon-counting, energy-discriminating detector technology developed by a collaboration at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). In this paper, we report our preliminary experimental results using this system, including geometrical alignment, photon energy characterization, protocol optimization, and spectral image reconstruction. We produced our scan datasets with a multi-material phantom, and then applied ordered subset-simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (OS-SART) to reconstruct images in different energy ranges and principal component analysis (PCA) to evaluate spectral deviation among the energy ranges.