A cone beam computed tomography system for true 3D imaging of specimens

A system for 3D cone beam computed tomography has been developed, consisting of a microfocus x-ray source and x-ray image intensifier coupled to a CCD camera. Full width at half maximum resolving power has been experimentally measured to be 70 microns when imaging 10 mm diameter objects. The 3D nature of the resulting image data can be used to visualize internal structure and compute parameters such as volume, surface area, and surface/volume orientation.