Dual-energy cone-beam Micro-CT for animal imaging: Preliminary study

We have recently developed a prototype cone-beam micro-CT system for studying new image reconstruction algorithms experimentally as well as for small animal imaging. Dual energy methods have widely been investigated and applied for eliminating beam hardening artifacts in the reconstructed images and for performing quantitative CT We have proposed earlier a pre-reconstruction-type dual energy method which has the advantage that the cone-beam CT data from two measurements with different x-ray energy spectra are first processed to obtain quantities that are approximately consistent with the x-ray transform, and then image reconstruction is performed. In this work, the proposed method is applied to the cone-beam micro-CT data acquired by our prototype system. Only the thickness maps of the object based on projection images are shown in this work as a preliminary.