Cardiac Micro-CT Using ECG Gating Signal for Small Animal Imaging

Micro-CT system is widely used for small laboratory animals imaging as a pre-clinical technique. The image quality for in vivo micro-CT system is substantially influenced by the physiological motion, e.g. cardiac motion and respiratory motion. In this paper, a cardiac micro-CT system with a CMOS flat panel detector and a pulse generated X-ray tube is presented in details to address this issue. ECG detection circuit is designed to provide a cardiac gating signal as a synchronized trigger for the pulsed Xray generation. In this method, projection images are acquired at each step angle with exact R peak of ECG signal. The CT image is reconstructed using the cone beam FDK algorithm. The proposed method will be used in our micro-CT system to restrain heart motion artifacts.