2021/03/19 by Singanallur Venkatakrishnan, Amirkoushyar Ziabari, Venkatakrishnan, Singanallur V. +5
Engineering · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced X-ray and CT Imaging #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications #Nuclear Physics and Applications #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.10624
openalex publication_date 2021/03/19 · openalex created_date 2021/03/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Tri-Structural Isotropic (TRISO) fuel particles are a key component of next generation nuclear fuels. Using X-ray computed tomography (CT) to characterize TRISO particles is challenging because of the strong attenuation of the X-ray beam by the uranium core leading to severe photon starvation in a substantial fraction of the measurements. Furthermore, the overall acquisition time for a high-resolution CT scan can be very long when using conventional lab-based X-ray systems and reconstruction algorithms. Specifically, when analytic methods like the Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) algorithm is used for reconstruction, it results in severe streaks artifacts and noise in the corresponding 3D volume which make subsequent analysis of the particles challenging. In this article, we develop and apply model-based image reconstruction (MBIR) algorithms for improving the quality of CT reconstructions for TRISO particles in order to facilitate better characterization. We demonstrate that the proposed MBIR algorithms can significantly suppress artifacts with minimal pre-processing compared to the conventional approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate the proposed MBIR approach can obtain high-quality reconstruction compared to the FDK approach even when using a fraction of the typically acquired measurements, thereby enabling dramatically faster measurement times for TRISO particles.