High-Resolution and Large-Volume Tomography Reconstruction for X-Ray Microscopy

Abstract

This paper presents a method of X-ray image acquisition for the high-resolution tomography reconstruction that uses a light source of synchrotron radiation to reconstruct a three-dimensional tomographic volume dataset for a nanoscale object. For large objects, because of the limited field-of-view, a projection image of an object should to be taken by several shots from different locations, and using an image stitching method to combine these image blocks together. In this study, the overlap of image blocks should be small because our light source is the synchrotron radiation and the X-ray dosage should be minimized as possible. We use the properties of synchrotron radiation to enable the image stitching and alignment success when the overlaps between adjacent image blocks are small. In this study, the size of overlaps can reach to 15% of the size of each image block. During the reconstruction, the mechanical stability should be considered because it leads the misalignment problem in tomography. We adopt the feature-based alignment method to solve this problem. Finally, we apply the proposed method for a kidney of mouse for verification.