CT-Projections Hardware Raw Data Acquisition System for Image Reconstruction

Computer tomography (CT) is a very competitive medical imaging field, where worldwide manufactures are constantly improving the state of the art investing huge amounts of money to assure sales. Therefore, warranties and maintenance contracts avoids hospital and university research labs in Latin America to have information access and to perform research experiments where CT hardware and software are involved. Despite this, university CT research labs are important to exist in order to create the "know-how" and to preserver the knowledge. This paper addresses important issues to create CT scanner experiments using donated equipment out of commercial companies support that not only take advantage of the hardware-software state of the art but in addition the experiments are used to improve the universal knowledge in the reconstruction algorithms field. One particular example is described where CT raw data is acquired and then parallel programming will be applied to obtain CT images at very low cost, improving quality and reducing reconstruction time.