Development and Evaluation of a High Performance Micro-CT System for Insect or Small Animal Imaging

A high performance micro-tomography (micro-CT) system for insect or small animal imaging has been developed. The system consists of an x-ray source with small focus spot and high brightness, a high precision rotation stage with an object chuck to achieve a cone-beam mode scan, and an x-ray imaging detector. The core of the system is a cooled x-ray imaging detector with high spatial resolution, high sensitivity and ultra-low noise. Since imaging performance of the detector is mostly responsible for the resultant image quality and eventually determines the quality of a tomogram, we have evaluated the imaging characteristics of the detector in terms of modulation-transfer function (MTF), noise-power spectrum (NPS) and give some high quality x-ray digital radiation (DR) and 3D rendered CT images of some insects and a small fish.