Desarrollo de software de librerías y aplicaciones para el control de sistemas micro-CT.

Computed tomography (CT) is one of the techniques most commonly used to retrieve anatomical information of living subjects non-invasively. During the last years, the advent of x-ray Cone Beam CT –CBCT– has enabled the development of dedicated imaging systems for specific environments. Nowadays, these systems are widely used in radiotherapy and image-guided surgery, imaging of specific regions and preclinical imaging in small animals.

Despite the advance experienced by CBCT during the last decade, the differences with conventional CT make it a subject of vigorous research, mainly due to the issues introduced by the use of a larger cone aperture and two-dimensional detectors. Micro-CT systems for smallanimal imaging add to the commented issues the need of a higher image resolution to observe anatomical structures with the same level of detail obtained for clinical CT.

The purpose of this project is the development of a set of low-level software libraries to control hardware elements of high resolution micro-CT systems based on microfocus x-ray sources and flat-panel detectors. The implemented libraries must offer an interface independent of the underlying hardware and the possibility of adding new hardware elements with no modifications in the high-level applications.

The designed libraries consisted of a set of individual modules controlling x-ray detectors, x-ray sources and control systems for motor drives, providing a transparent interface to the high level application. The low-level libraries were integrated into a high-level application for the acquisition and basic processing of micro-CT image.

The individual components were tested on two existent micro-CT systems, assessing the functionality of the libraries. The complete software architecture was included in an existent micro-CT system and a set of CT data was acquired and reconstructed, proving the validity of the developed software for the successful generation of CT volumes.