Advanced hard X-ray imaging techniques at Elettra - Sincrotrone Trieste
Lucia Mancini
Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A., 34149 Basovizza, Trieste, Italy
Imaging techniques play an important role in several research fields from medicine to the
analysis of biomaterials, from material science to geosciences and cultural heritage studies. Hard Xray based techniques are also of particular interest and X-ray micro-radiography has proved to be
useful for the medical diagnostics and some material science studies.
In recent years great interest has been posed on X-ray computed microtomography (mCT)
techniques, based on both microfocus and synchrotron radiation sources. These imaging techniques
allow the three-dimensional (3D) analysis of the internal structure of objects at high spatial
resolution (at the micron- and submicron- scales). Moreover, investigations performed directly in
the 3D domain overcome the limitations of stereological methods usually applied to microscopybased analyses and enable to get 3D images of the internal core of a sample in a non-destructive
way, more suitable for further complementary analyses and for precious or unique samples (fossils,
archeological finds, in-vivo imaging, etc...). A novel challenge lies on the extraction of quantitative
measures and indices directly from the acquired 3D data sets. Porosity and specific surface area as
well as anisotropy, connectivity and tortuosity are interesting descriptors of a 3D model. However,
accurate image processing and analysis methods for an effective assessment of these parameters are
still an open issue in several applications. To this purpose, the Pore3D software library has been
developed at the Elettra - Sincrotrone Trieste laboratory (Basovizza, Italy). The particular case of
high-resolution mCT images requires ad hoc software tools able to manage large 3D dataset. This
software library assures a complete control of the algorithm implementation and permits to apply
different strategies of analysis as a function of the specific scientific application.
In this seminar several applications of X-ray mCT methodologies for the extraction of
quantitative information from mCT images both in the medical and material science fields will be
presented.