On the 3D X-ray image, hips of a corn weevil become visible. A 3D X-ray movie shows the screw-and-nut–type hip joint inside a living weevil (Image: dos Santos Rolo et al., PNAS, 2014).

PNAS: Scientists develop X-ray cine-tomography to track morphological dynamics in time-resolved tomography data

X-ray microtomography is a well-established tool to study the three-dimensional morphology of static biological samples. To capture motion in living specimen in real time, movies of X-ray projections are frequently used. However, the resulting loss of information about the third spatial dimension has limited the applicability of such acquisition protocols. Now, by combining ultrafast X-ray microtomography and sophisticated motion analysis, Scientists from ANKA/IPS developed X-ray cine-tomography as a tool to visualize the internal dynamics of non-translucent millimeter-sized samples in three-dimensional space. They demonstrate the technique by analyzing the fast-moving screw-and-nut–type hip joint inside a living weevil.
Cine-tomography was presented in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS) and may be applied to a wide range of samples and processes across materials and life sciences.


 

KIT press release (German)

Reference:
Tomy dos Santos Rolo, Alexey Ershov, Thomas van de Kamp, and Tilo Baumbach: In vivo X-ray cine-tomography for tracking morphological dynamics, PNAS Early Edition (2014), DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1308650111