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Updated: May 17, 2026
Energy Dispersive X-ray Tomography for 3D Elemental Mapping of Individual Nanoparticles
Published on: July 5, 2016
Experimental demonstration of benchtop x-ray fluorescence computed tomography (XFCT) of gold nanoparticle-loaded
Bernard L Jones1, Nivedh Manohar, Francisco Reynoso
1Nuclear/Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics Programs, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0405, USA.
Abstract:
This report presents the first experimental demonstration, to our knowledge, of benchtop polychromatic cone-beam x-ray fluorescence computed tomography (XFCT) for a simultaneous determination of the spatial distribution and amount of gold nanoparticles (GNPs) within small-animal-sized objects. The current benchtop experimental setup successfully produced XFCT images accurately showing the regions containing small amount of GNPs (on the order of 0.1 mg) within a 3 cm diameter plastic phantom. In particular, the performance of the current XFCT setup was improved remarkably (e.g., at least a factor of 3 reduction in XFCT scan time) using a tin-filtered polychromatic beam in comparison with a lead-filtered beam. The results of this study strongly suggest that the current benchtop XFCT configuration can be made practical with a few modifications such as the deployment of array detectors, while meeting realistic constraints on x-ray dose, scan time and image resolution for routine pre-clinical in vivo imaging with GNPs.
