Measurement of the X-ray computed tomography instrument geometry by minimization of reprojection errors—Implementation on experimental data

A procedure for measuring the geometry of X-ray computed tomography (CT) instruments is applied to an experimental CT instrument. In this study, the geometrical measurement procedure is implemented with the CT2 reference object, comprising steel spheres with known center positions in a local coordinate frame affixed to a cylindrical carbon fiber framework. The procedure can be implemented with other sphere-based reference objects, provided the sphere center coordinates are known. The effects of number of acquired projections and rotation mode (stepped or continuous) on the quality of measured geometrical parameters are studied. Finally, the output of the geometrical measurement procedure is used to inform the physical adjustment of the experimental CT instrument to its ideal alignment. The effectiveness of the measurement procedure to correctly determine the instrument geometry is demonstrated from dimensional measurements performed on a tomographically reconstructed validation object from radiographs acquired under initial (misaligned) and adjusted (aligned) instrument geometry.