A new multi-energy CT for small animals is being developed at the Physics Department of the
University of Bologna, Italy. The system makes use of a set of quasi-monochromatic X-ray beams,
with energy tunable in a range from 26 KeV to 72 KeV. These beams are produced by Bragg
diffraction on a Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite crystal. With quasi-monochromatic sources it is
possible to perform multi-energy investigation in a more effective way, as compared with conventional
X-ray tubes.
Multi-energy techniques allow extracting physical information from the materials, such as effective
atomic number, mass-thickness, density, that can be used to distinguish and quantitatively characterize
the irradiated tissues. The aim of the system is the investigation and the development of new pre-clinic
methods for the early detection of the tumors in small animals.
An innovative technique, the Triple-Energy Radiography with Contrast Medium (TER), has been
successfully implemented on our system.
TER consist in combining a set of three quasi-monochromatic images of an object, in order to obtain a
corresponding set of three single-tissue images, which are the mass-thickness map of three reference
materials. TER can be applied to the quantitative mass-thickness-map reconstruction of a contrast
medium, because it is able to remove completely the signal due to other tissues (i.e. the structural
background noise). The technique is very sensitive to the contrast medium and is insensitive to the
superposition of different materials. The method is a good candidate to the early detection of the tumor
angiogenesis in mice.
In this work we describe the tomographic system, with a particular focus on the quasi-monochromatic
source. Moreover the TER method is presented with some preliminary results about small animal
imaging.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unibo.it/oai:amsdottorato.cib.unibo.it:841 |
| Date | 12 June 2008 |
| Creators | Masetti, Simone <1970> |
| Contributors | Baldazzi, Giuseppe |
| Publisher | Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna |
| Source Sets | Università di Bologna |
| Language | Italian |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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