Disassemblable Fieldwork CT Scanner Using a 3D-printed Calibration Phantom
This addresses the problem of on-site CT imaging for researchers in fields like biology and cultural heritage, where traditional scanners are not feasible, though it is incremental as it builds on existing calibration and CT methods.
The authors tackled the challenge of performing high-quality CT scanning in fieldwork or on-site conditions where commercial scanners are impractical, by developing a low-cost, disassemblable CT scanner that uses 3D-printed calibration phantoms to compute projection matrices directly from X-ray projections, resulting in successful tomographic reconstructions of several specimens as proof of concept.
The use of computed tomography (CT) imaging has become of increasing interest to academic areas outside of the field of medical imaging and industrial inspection, e.g., to biology and cultural heritage research. The pecularities of these fields, however, sometimes require that objects need to be imaged on-site, e.g., in field-work conditions or in museum collections. Under these circumstances, it is often not possible to use a commercial device and a custom solution is the only viable option. In order to achieve high image quality under adverse conditions, reliable calibration and trajectory reproduction are usually key requirements for any custom CT scanning system. Here, we introduce the construction of a low-cost disassemblable CT scanner that allows calibration even when trajectory reproduction is not possible due to the limitations imposed by the project conditions. Using 3D-printed in-image calibration phantoms, we compute a projection matrix directly from each captured X-ray projection. We describe our method in detail and show successful tomographic reconstructions of several specimen as proof of concept.