Abstract
The development of new methods or utilization of current X-ray computed tomography methods is impeded by the substantial amount of expertise required to design an X-ray computed tomography experiment from beginning to end. In an attempt to make material models, data acquisition schemes and reconstruction algorithms more accessible to researchers lacking expertise in some of these areas, a software package is described here which can generate complex simulated phantoms and quantitatively evaluate new or existing data acquisition schemes and image reconstruction algorithms for targeted applications.
Highlights
X-ray imaging techniques have been developed by and for the medical imaging community and adapted for other uses. This may be the cause of three common problems in the synchrotron X-ray computed tomography (XCT) community: (i) the Shepp–Logan phantom (Shepp & Logan, 1974) is still used as a standard phantom, but it does not represent the materials of a diverse synchrotron research community, (ii) trying alternative acquisition schemes and experimental setups is difficult, especially for scanning probes, and (iii) researchers are not quantitatively evaluating alternate reconstruction methods
In order to bridge the gap between materials scientists, physicists and mathematicians, we have created a modular software toolbox/framework (Fig. 1) written in Python to help users and developers of synchrotron-based tomography to develop, validate and share XCT experimental methods
With XDesign, materials scientists can choose experimental methods based on phantoms they have created to resemble their actual materials of interest, physicists can optimize data acquisition methods using quantitative quality measures, and mathematicians can test their numerical algorithms on more diverse geometries and flexible input data
Summary
X-ray imaging techniques have been developed by and for the medical imaging community and adapted for other uses This may be the cause of three common problems in the synchrotron X-ray computed tomography (XCT) community: (i) the Shepp–Logan phantom (Shepp & Logan, 1974) is still used as a standard phantom, but it does not represent the materials of a diverse synchrotron research community, (ii) trying alternative acquisition schemes and experimental setups is difficult, especially for scanning probes, and (iii) researchers are not quantitatively evaluating alternate reconstruction methods. All graphics are rendered using Matplotlib (Hunter, 2007)
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