FleX-ray Project

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FleX-ray is an exciting new project which is a collaboration between 4 different institutions.

A real-time, adaptive, spectral, x-ray CT system (coming soon!)

FleX-ray is an exciting new project which is a collaboration between four different institutions: XRE, Nikhef, ASI and CWI contribute their respective expertise in x-ray CT systems, detector R&D and advanced CT reconstruction algorithms.

FleX-ray will enable very fast CT scans simultaneously with superior low contrast imaging and spectral sensitivity. The goal is to be able to identify elements per voxel (3D pixel), providing a new energy dimension of information for analysis! In medical applications, this system has several benefits, including:

  • Reducing or eliminating beam hardening artefacts with the spectral information. This effect is very obvious whenever any metal is in the scan
  • Identifying concentrations of specific contrast agents such as iodine or gadolinium
  • Reducing dose significantly due to the speed of the detector and imaging at several energies simultaneously

Once this proof of concept machine is realised, large area Medipix3 based detectors can be developed and integrated into a 2nd generation machine. Currently the size of the Medipix3 detector is too small for human scale use.

Currently the project is at the stage where we have all the hardware including the conventional working x-ray CT system from XRE and the Medipix3 detectors. Now, systems integration of the CT reconstruction system and the Medipix3 detector is the main focus.