Oxygenation imaging of deep targets at high resolution with an x-ray luminescence micro-CT system

Abstract

Imaging the oxygenation distribution at a high spatial resolution in deep tissues such as bone marrow is important because it helps us in understanding the oxygenation's role on stem cell proliferation and differentiation inside the bone marrow. Current technologies have limitations in imaging the oxygenation of deep targets. To overcome these limitations, x-ray Luminescence Computed Tomography (XLCT) has the potentials to image the oxygenation of bone marrow at a spatial resolution close to the focused x-ray beam size, which is better than 150 micrometers. In this study, oxygenation sensing films have been developed. Then, we have improved our XLCT imaging system by adding optical filters for measurements of photons at multiple wavelengths so that we are able to image the oxygenation of deep film targets. Then, we have conducted a phantom experiment to validate this approach. We obtained the oxygen concentration images by measuring the ratios of the XLCT images at two wavelengths.