A study on spiral cone beam scanning mode for preclinical micro-CT

In preclinical micro-CT, a circular scanning trajectory is widely used, and the Feldkamp algorithm is usually the standard reconstruction method to recover the images. This imaging mode has the advantages of fast reconstruction speed and good intra-slice resolution for images near the central plane. However, it shows cone-beam artifacts for images at relatively large cone angles. To address this problem, a spiral scanning trajectory is employed for the micro-CT. Spiral reconstruction algorithms were utilized to reconstruct the images and compared with the standard Feldkamp algorithm. The results show that the spiral approach delivers images with reduced cone beam artifacts.