Small animal imaging with a quasi-monochromatic multi-energy CT

Quasi-monochromatic Multi-Energy CT (M.E.C.T.) imaging can produce many upgrades to polychromatic ones, in terms of background subtraction and tissues recognition, that seems to be the fundamental task to investigate the pathology rapidly growing like angiogenesis. To analyze these capabilities, a CT prototype with a quasi-monochromatic X-ray source was developed at the Physics Department of the University of Bologna. Tests performed on dedicated phantoms show that multiple energy imaging based on three energy algorithms drastically reduces background signals, making possible the tissues separation and the visualization of very low concentration of iodine contrast medium (also 10 time smaller than traditional ones). Beneath the possibility to separate different signals, our M.E.C.T. becomes a very interesting X-ray apparatus to extract information on physical-chemical structure of tissues.