A preliminary study on a dual-modality OPT/micro-CT system

Optical projection tomography (OPT) is a mesoscopic scale optical imaging technique for specimens between 1mm and 10mm. Although OPT is widely used for in vivo and ex vivo imaging, its applications in high intensity tissues such as bone and thick samples are limited due to the strong absorption of the light. In contrast, X-ray micro-CT is suitable for high intensity tissue imaging but its contrast of soft tissue is poor. Therefore, imaging tools with both strong penetration and high contrast are in great demand. To address this issue, we develop a dual-modality system integrating both OPT and micro-CT. In this paper, this dual-modality system is applied to dynamic imaging of a clearing process of a mouse paw. The clearing process is essential in OPT when imaging thick or intensity tissues since it can make high intensity tissues optically transparent. In our experiment, we scan the mouse paw with our system - before, during and after optical clearing. Each time we scan CT first and then the OPT. After acquisition, 3-dimentional volumes of OPT and CT are reconstructed separately. Then we use a rigid image registration algorithm to register these volumes. Finally, the volumes are merged together. The experimental results show our bimodal system performs better than single OPT or CT system when processing tissues with both high intensity and soft parts.