Circular Cone-beam Micro-CT for Small Animal Imaging with Truncated Data

We applied a backprojection filtration (BPF) algorithm to small animal imaging with transversely truncated projection data acquired by our prototype circular cone-beam micro-CT system. For comparison of the reconstructed images with and without truncation data, we used a mouse as the subject and scanned whole mouse without data truncation. One of the legs was chosen as a region-of-interest (ROI), and data truncation was manually made by chopping off other projection area than ROI projection from the data at each view. Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) algorithm was also used to reconstruct the image from both nontruncated and truncated cone-beam data for comparison. The BPF algorithm successfully reconstructed the ROI image from truncated data with comparable image quality of that reconstructed from nontruncated data, while FDK algorithm reconstructed the ROI image with typical truncation artifacts.