Mechanical Artifacts in Optical Projection Tomography: Classification
  and Automatic Calibration
Yan Liu Jonathan Dong Thanh-An Pham Francois Marelli Michael Unser
Optical projection tomography (OPT) is a powerful tool for biomedical
studies. It achieves 3D visualization of mesoscopic biological samples with
high spatial resolution using conventional tomographic-reconstruction
algorithms. However, various artifacts degrade the quality of the reconstructed
images due to experimental imperfections in the OPT instruments. While many
efforts have been made to characterize and correct for these artifacts, they
focus on one specific type of artifacts. This work has two contributions.
First, we systematically document a catalog of mechanical artifacts based on a
3D description of the imaging system that uses a set of angular and
translational parameters. Then, we introduce a calibration algorithm that
recovers the unknown system parameters fed into the final 3D iterative
reconstruction algorithm for a distortion-free volumetric image. Simulations
with beads data and experimental results on a fluorescent textile fiber confirm
that our algorithm successfully removes miscalibration artifacts in the
reconstruction.