CT system shows bone structure at high resolution

Franz Pfeiffer, a professor of Biomedical Physics at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), led the research team that developed new nano-CT imaging system, which can produce images showing bone structure and changes in bone density at high resolutions and in 3D.

Pfeiffer’s team built on existing X-ray computed tomography (CT) systems that X-ray the body while a detector records how much radiation is being absorbed from different angles. A number of such pictures are then used to generate digital 3D images of the body’s interior using image processing.

The method measures not only the overall beam intensity absorbed by the object under examination at each angle, but also those parts of the X-ray beam that are diffracted from it. The diffraction patterns are then processed using an algorithm developed by the team.

TUM researcher Martin Dierolf said: ’We developed an image-reconstruction algorithm that generates a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of the sample using over 100,000 diffraction patterns. This algorithm takes into account not only classical X-ray absorption, but also the significantly more sensitive phase shift of the X-rays.’