Low-dose x-ray tomography through a deep convolutional neural network
Abstract Synchrotron-based X-ray tomography offers the potential for rapid large-scale reconstructions of the interiors of materials and biological tissue at fine resolution. However, for radiation sensitive samples, there remain fundamental trade-offs between damaging samples during longer acquisit...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Nature Publishing Group
2018-02-01
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| Series: | Scientific Reports |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-19426-7 |
| Summary: | Abstract Synchrotron-based X-ray tomography offers the potential for rapid large-scale reconstructions of the interiors of materials and biological tissue at fine resolution. However, for radiation sensitive samples, there remain fundamental trade-offs between damaging samples during longer acquisition times and reducing signals with shorter acquisition times. We present a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) method that increases the acquired X-ray tomographic signal by at least a factor of 10 during low-dose fast acquisition by improving the quality of recorded projections. Short-exposure-time projections enhanced with CNNs show signal-to-noise ratios similar to long-exposure-time projections. They also show lower noise and more structural information than low-dose short-exposure acquisitions post-processed by other techniques. We evaluated this approach using simulated samples and further validated it with experimental data from radiation sensitive mouse brains acquired in a tomographic setting with transmission X-ray microscopy. We demonstrate that automated algorithms can reliably trace brain structures in low-dose datasets enhanced with CNN. This method can be applied to other tomographic or scanning based X-ray imaging techniques and has great potential for studying faster dynamics in specimens |
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| ISSN: | 2045-2322 |