Development of methodologies for X-ray transmission CT imaging to provide both chemical and morphological information (G0A0417N)

In conventional high-resolution X-ray computed tomography (micro-CT), the internal and external morphology of an object or patient can be determined in 3D. This is a very powerful and very common technique in medicine, but also in material science, geology, biomedicine, etc. it is becoming increasingly popular. However, a conventional CT scan measures the local X-ray linear attenuation coefficient which often doesn’ provide sufficient chemical information about the sample. Recently, hyperspectral X-ray detectors have been developed, which measure the incident X-ray spectrum in each pixel of a 2D image matrix. This energy spectrum carries a fingerprint of the chemical composition of the sample under investigation, and this allows to obtain both 3D morphological and chemical information simultaneously using computed tomography. This project proposes to develop processing methodologies for such 4-dimensional (3 spatial dimensions + X-ray energy) micro-CT datasets measured with 2 different state-of-the-art detector systems (SLcam and HEXITEC). Additionally, we will develop a method to take into account the polychromatic nature of laboratorybased micro-CT in the tomographic reconstruction algorithm. In this project we will implement more accurate modelling of the physical imaging process in the iterative reconstruction. This will enable us to improve 3D chemical and morphological characterization using more conventional equipment