Affiliations: CT/Micro-CT Laboratory, Department of Radiology,
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA | Department of Biochemical Engineering, University of
Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA | Department of Mathematics, University of Iowa, Iowa
City, IA 52242, USA | Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua
University, Beijing, China | Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Milwaukee,
WI 53201, USA | The Lillie Frank Abercrombie Section of Cardiology
Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's
Hospital, Houston, TX 77030, USA
Abstract: A state of the art X-ray micro-CT scanner takes about 20 seconds to
acquire a full dataset, which is too slow to capture the rapidly beating heart
of small animals. We have been working to develop the first electron-beam
micro-CT (EBMCT) prototype for cardiac imaging of the mice and rats. In this
paper, we describe the background on electron-beam CT (EBCT) and emphasize the
needs for EBMCT. Then, we present a top-level design and a preliminary physical
analysis for the first EBMCT scanner. The proposed EBMCT prototype would allow
0.03–0.01 s temporal resolution (35–70 half-scans per second) with
0.2 mm spatial resolution and 10% contrast resolution. Finally, we discuss a
few related issues to further highlight that this project is not only important
for basic biomedical research but also feasible technically.
Keywords: electron-beam micro-CT (EBMCT), cone-beam, circular and spiral scanning loci, small animal imaging, cardiac imaging
