A novel design of ultrafast micro-CT system based on carbon nanotube: A feasibility study in phantom

Artifacts induced by respiratory motion during routine diagnosis severely degrades the image quality. The increase of scanning speed plays an important role to avoid motion artifacts. Limited to the mechanical structure of conventional CT, the increase of gantry rotational speed is unsustainable and a more feasible way is to increase the number of X-ray sources and detectors like the dual-source CT. This paper focuses on high-speed scanning CT and proposes a novel ultrafast micro-CT (UMCT) system based on carbon nanotube (CNT). At each exposure position, all of the X-ray sources are fast activated by turns and the flat-panel detectors collect the corresponding projection data. Then, the gantry will be contrarotated 40° to prepare for the next exposure until the rotation covers full 360°. Because each exposure is very fast, the organ motions of in vivo human body can be greatly reduced. This paper introduces the UMCT system design, image reconstruction algorithm and experimental results. Simulation experiment was also carried out on UMCT system. The result validated the feasibility of the UMCT system.