COMBINING HIGH-FIDELITY HELICAL MICROTOMOGRAPHY WITH REGION-OF-INTEREST SCANNING FOR IMPROVED CORE CHARACTERISATION

In this paper we show that optimization-based autofocus may be used to overcome the instabilities that have, until now, made high-resolution theoretically-exact tomographic reconstruction impractical. To our knowledge, this represents the first successful use of theoretically-exact reconstruction in helical micro computed tomography (micro-CT) imaging. We show that autofocuscorrected, theoretically-exact helical CT is a viable option for high-resolution micro-CT imaging at high cone-angles (50). The elevated cone-angle enables better utilization of the available X-ray flux and therefore shorter image acquisition time than conventional micro-CT systems.