Phase contrast micro-CT is a powerful technique allowing imaging of soft tissue at synchrotrons or using laboratory sources. The use of contrast agents is a useful approach when imaging vascular structures. However, common x-ray contrast agents typically rely on heavy metals to increase absorption, which may affect the phase contrast and cause artifacts in the reconstructed volumes. Thus, utilizing an agent with lower attenuation similar to soft tissue is clearly advantageous. Here, we evaluated different colored radiopaque solutions (tissue marking dyes) which had been injected into the vascular system of bovine lung samples, prior to embedding in paraffin. Scans were performed using a micro-focus x-tube calibrated to 10 µm spot size at 70 kV and a photon counting detector with a silicon sensor and 75 µm pixels. The resulting volumes have a voxel size of (25 µm)3 , limited by the size of the samples, but sufficient to resolve the vascular system. Experiments confirmed that sufficient perfusion of the vessels with the dyes could be achieved, and the different dyes could be clearly discerned in the reconstructed volumes without causing artifacts allowing to clearly identify features in the soft tissue. Further, the findings were confirmed by histology.
Driven by needs from scientific research, healthcare and industrial manufacturing, X-ray microscopy has been successfully transferred from synchrotrons to the laboratory and the spatial resolution has been pushed to sub-micrometer. One way to further improve the resolution is to use an X-ray source with a very small focal spot. At Excillum, based on advanced electron beam and target technologies, a state-of-art nanofocus x-ray tube has been developed which enables an isotropic, resolution of 150 nm line-spacing all the way up to 160 kV of acceleration voltage.
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