Fiber orientation in a whole mouse heart reconstructed by laboratory phase-contrast micro-CT

Abstract

Purpose: We present a phase-contrast x-ray tomography study of wild type C57BL/6 mouse hearts as a nondestructive approach to the microanatomy on the scale of the entire excised organ. Based on the partial coherence at a home-built phase-contrast -CT setup installed at a liquid metal jet source, we exploit phase retrieval and hence achieve superior image quality for heart tissue, almost comparable to previous synchrotron data on the whole organ scale.