Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 21, 2026
Mesoscopic Optical Imaging of Whole Mouse Heart
Published on: October 14, 2021
Interior tomographic imaging of mouse heart in a carbon nanotube micro-CT
Hao Gong1, Rui Liu2,3, Hengyong Yu3
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA.
Background:
The relatively high radiation dose from micro-CT is a cause for concern in preclinical research involving animal subjects. Interior region-of-interest (ROI) imaging was proposed for dose reduction, but has not been experimentally applied in micro-CT.
Objective:
Our aim is to implement interior ROI imaging in a carbon nanotube (CNT) x-ray source based micro-CT, and present the ROI image quality and radiation dose reduction for interior cardiac micro-CT imaging of a mouse heart in situ.
Methods:
An aperture collimator was mounted at the source-side to induce a small-sized cone beam (10 mm width) at the isocenter. Interior in situ micro-CT scans were conducted on a mouse carcass and several micro-CT phantoms. A GPU-accelerated hybrid iterative reconstruction algorithm was employed for volumetric image reconstruction. Radiation dose was measured for the same system operated at the interior and global micro-CT modes.
Results:
Visual inspection demonstrated comparable image quality between two scan modes. Quantitative evaluation demonstrated high structural similarity index (up to 0.9614) with improved contrast-noise-ratio (CNR) on interior micro-CT mode. Interior micro-CT mode yielded significant reduction (up to 83.9%) for dose length product (DLP).
Conclusions:
This work demonstrates the applicability of using CNT x-ray source based interior micro-CT for preclinical imaging with significantly reduced radiation dose.
