Swinging multi-source industrial CT systems for aperiodic dynamic imaging

The goal of this paper is to develop a new architecture for industrial computed tomography (ICT) aiming at dynamically imaging an aperiodic changing object. We propose a data acquisition approach with multiple x-ray source/detector pairs targeting a continuously changeable object with corresponding timeframes. In this named swinging multi-source CT (SMCT) structure, each source and its associated detector swing forth and back within a certain angle for CT scanning. In the SMCT system design, we utilize a circular journal bearing based setup to replace the normal CT slip ring by weakening the scanning speed requirement. Inspired by the prior image constrained compressed sensing (PICCS) algorithm, we apply a modified PICCS algorithm for the SMCT (SM-PICCS). Our numerical simulation and realistic specimen experiment studies demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.