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Performance Evaluation of a Novel Preclinical Micro-CT System In Vitro and In Vivo

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Abstract

Purpose

With the advent of innovation in the preclinical studies, micro-CT provides optimized resolution by high-power X-ray output tube and flat-panel detector with ultra-short scanning time. The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of a novel preclinical micro-CT with different parameters and protocols.

Methods

Imaging quality was evaluated by micro-CT HA and wire phantom. The high power output X-ray tube provides tube voltage from 40 to 90 kV with tube current, 10 to 800 μA. The detector with 1536 × 1944 pixels was implemented by three different binning modes (1 × 1, 2 × 2 and 4 × 4). The GPU-based reconstruction was applied with Feldkamp’s algorithm. The maximum reconstruction volume was 1944 × 1944 × 4536 per scan. The phantom images were acquired by four modes with pixel sizes of 44.9, 22.5,15 and 9 μm. In the animal study, ovariectomy mice were imaged followed by analysis of bone mineral density (BMD) and BV/TV ratio (bone volume/total bone volume).

Results

Linearity (R2) measured in all imaging settings were > 0.9 and was 0.99962 at setting of 0.2 mm Cu filter, 90 kV tube voltage and 556 μA tube current. The spatial resolution as measured by full width half-maximum amplitude (FWHM) was 24 µm in the mode ultra-high resolution. The bone analysis results show the operated cohort has high significant (p < 0.05), whereas the control cohort revealed insignificant either in the BMD.

Conclusion

In summary, this novel micro-CT system demonstrated the flexible capability and high spatial resolution with ultra-short acquisition time, and a feasible quantitative BMD software.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Molecular and Genetic Imaging Core, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan Animal Consortium and National PET/Cyclotron Center, Department of Nuclear Medicine, Taipei Veterans General Hospital and Delbio company. We appreciated the technical information and the innovation development in hardware and software from Delbio. Also, the authors appreciate all participants who are involved in and all small animal recruitment in this study.

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Author notes

  1. Yi-Wen Lo and Chien-Chih Ke have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National PET and Cyclotron Center (NPCC), Department of Nuclear Medicine, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

    Yi-Wen Lo, Bang-Hung Yang, Wen-Sheng Huang & Ren-Shyan Liu

  2. Department of Medical Imaging and Radiological Science, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

    Chien-Chih Ke

  3. Drug Development and Value Creation Research Center, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

    Chien-Chih Ke

  4. Department of Medical Research, Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

    Chien-Chih Ke

  5. Medical LOB, DELBio INC, Taoyuan, Taiwan

    Jhih-Shain Lee, Sih-Yu Chen, Wen-Chieh Yang & Ming-Chin Hu

  6. Biomedical Imaging Research Center, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hsien-Chih Chiu, Cheng-Hsu Lu, Bang-Hung Yang & Ren-Shyan Liu

  7. Department of Biomedical Imaging and Radiological Sciences, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Cheng-Hsu Lu, Bang-Hung Yang & Ren-Shyan Liu

  8. Department of Nuclear Medicine, Cheng-Hsin General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

    Ren-Shyan Liu

Authors
  1. Yi-Wen Lo
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  2. Chien-Chih Ke
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  9. Bang-Hung Yang
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  10. Wen-Sheng Huang
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Contributions

YWL, CCK, BHY, RSL—Conceptualization. JSL—Software development support and hardware innovation. WCY, MCH—Acquisition of Phantom data. SYC, CHL, CCK—Acquisition of animal data. YWL, CHL—Data statistics. YWL—Paper writing. CCK—Paper editing. BHY (Physics), RSL (Biomedicine)—Paper review.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Bang-Hung Yang or Ren-Shyan Liu.

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Lo, YW., Ke, CC., Lee, JS. et al. Performance Evaluation of a Novel Preclinical Micro-CT System In Vitro and In Vivo. J. Med. Biol. Eng. 40, 24–34 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40846-019-00487-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40846-019-00487-6

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