A research team being lead by Ge Wang at Virginia Tech and nano-CT company, Xradia, Concord, CA have been awarded a $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the next-generation nano-CT imaging system, which promises to greatly reduce the required dose of radiation.In addition, Virginia Tech and Xradia are also investing $800,000 with a cost-sharing arrangement.

“X-ray nano-CT is a cutting edge imaging tool," Wang said in the press release. “But a long-standing barrier to realizing its full potential is its inability to precisely reconstruct an interior region of interest within a larger object from purely local projections.”

As a precursor to this technology, Wang and collaborators, Yangbo Ye of the University of Iowa and Hengyong Yu, who is the associate director of Wang’s CT lab, patented a novel x-ray imaging method called “interior tomography,” which Wang said was "a first step" towards overcoming the long-standing barrier to realizing the full potential of x-ray nano-CT.

Wang suggested to the NSF that the combination of X-ray nano-CT and interior tomography will provide “a versatile nano-imaging tool that can visualize fine features within a larger object, and use a much lower radiation dose and in much less time.”

If their project is successful, this next generation nano-CT imaging system will provide images with deeply imbedded details, including subcellular features.

For more information on this project, visit  http://www.imaging.sbes.vt.edu or http://www.xradia.com/