2025/02/14 by Harry Allan, Allan, Harry, Adam Doherty +29
Medicine · #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) #Lung Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment #Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications #Medical Physics (physics.med-ph) #Radiomics and Machine Learning in Medical Imaging
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.10322
openalex publication_date 2025/02/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
X-ray microtomography is a powerful non-destructive technique allowing 3D virtual histology of resected human tissue. The achievable imaging field-of-view, is however limited by the fixed number of detector elements, enforcing the requirement to sacrifice spatial resolution in order to image larger samples. In applications such as soft-tissue imaging, phase-contrast methods are often employed to enhance image contrast. Some of these methods, especially those suited to laboratory sources, rely on optical elements, the dimensions of which can impose a further limitation on the field-of-view. We describe an efficient method to double the maximum field-of-view of a cone-beam X-ray microtomography system, without sacrificing on spatial resolution, and including multi-contrast capabilities. We demonstrate an experimental realisation of the method, achieving exemplary reconstructions of a resected human lung sample, with a cubic voxel of 10.5 μm linear dimensions, across a horizontal field-of-view of 4.3 cm. The same concepts are applied to free-space propagation imaging of a 2.7 mm segment of the same sample, achieving a cubic voxel of 450 nm linear dimensions. We show that the methodology can be applied at a range of different length-scales and geometries, and that it is directly compatible with complementary implementations of X-ray phase-contrast imaging.