Stationary Multi-source AI-powered Real-time Tomography (SMART)

Abstract: Over the past decades, the development of CT technologies has been largely driven by the needs for cardiac imaging but the temporal resolution remains insufficient for clinical CT in difficult cases and rather challenging for preclinical micro-CT since small animals, as human cardiac disease models, have much higher heart rates than human. To address this challenge, here we report a Stationary Multi-source AI-based Real-time Tomography (SMART) micro-CT system. This unique scanner is featured by 29 source-detector pairs fixed on a circular track to collect x-ray signals in parallel, enabling instantaneous tomography in principle. Given the multi-source architecture, the field-of-view only covers a cardiac region. To solve this interior problem, an AI-empowered interior tomography approach is developed to synergize sparsity-based regularization and learning-based reconstruction. To demonstrate the performance and utilities of the SMART system, extensive results are obtained in physical phantom experiments and animal studies, including dead and live rats as well as live rabbits. The reconstructed volumetric images convincingly demonstrate the merits of the SMART system using the AI-empowered interior tomography approach, enabling cardiac micro-CT with the unprecedented temporal resolution of 30ms, which is an order of magnitude higher than the state of the art.