Development of the acquisition software for a cone beam in-vitro micro-CT.

During the 70’s Computed Tomography (CT) opened the door to the possibility of obtaining anatomical information from living subjects non-invasively. Since then, this technology has become indispensable for clinical diagnostic in medicine as well as for sanitary research. Consequently, micro-CTs rose from the necessity in the preclinical environment of the advantages that CT offers to the clinicians, providing high-resolution images of small samples.

The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has designed a new high-resolution in-vitro x-ray micro-CT that will serve as a test bench for wide number of applications in research and teaching. The goal of this project is to implement a control and data acquisition software for this device. LabVIEW has been used as the development environment due to the advantages that offers in the creation of graphical user interfaces, its commodious configuration to communicate with many types of hardware elements and its flexibility to expand the software in future works with few modifications.

This project comprises the development of a set of libraries to control the hardware elements: x-ray source, flat-panel detector and mechanical system of the UC3M test bench. In addition, the implementation of a “step and shoot” acquisition protocol is needed, which combines control libraries previously developed. The architecture of the implemented software leads to the possibility of expanding its functionalities into more advanced features such as advanced acquisition protocols or imaging techniques.

The work included in this project is framed in one of the lines of research carried out at the Biomedical Imaging and Instrumentation Group at the Departamento de Bioingeniería e Ingenería Aereospacial of the University Carlos III de Madrid.