WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Professor Jens Gregor

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of Tennessee - Knoxville

     Tuesday, April 29, 2008
4:00 p.m.,  Manchester Hall, Room 024

Micro-CT/SPECT Imaging of Mice:  Computational Challenges

A few years ago, our group developed a micro-CT/SPECT system for the purpose of imaging mice that suffer from amyloidosis. This talk provides an overview of the system and the application with emphasis on the design of the image reconstruction software.

The micro-CT conebeam system consists of a microfocus x-ray source along with a CCD detector optically coupled to a phosphor screen.  The dual-head micro-SPECT system is based on photomultiplier tubes coupled to sodium-iodide crystals. Both pinhole and parallel hole collimation is supported. 

CT images are reconstructed using either the Feldkamp algorithm or an accelerated OS version of SIRT with the system model computed on-the-fly using trilinear interpolation. The code is written to take advantage of the computational power provided by a multicore cluster. SPECT images are reconstructed using an OSEM algorithm for which the system model is precomputed based on volume intersection. 

Experimental results include work with a transgenic mouse model of systemic AA-amyloidosis and an induced mouse model of localized AL-amyloidosis.

About the speaker:  Professor Gregor was born and raised in Denmark. He received an MS in Electrical Engineering in 1988 followed by a Ph.D. in 1991, both from Aalborg University. He then joined the Department of Computer Science at The University of Tennessee where, after a merger that took place this past summer, he currently holds the position of Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Research interests include all aspects of computational imaging. In addition to small animal based tomography he has worked on applications ranging from neutron imaging of low-level radioactive waste, x-ray CT of man-made objects, and scene modeling based on laser range finding.

Refreshments at 3:30 p.m. in Manchester Hall, Room 336

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