Mechanical Artifacts in Optical Projection Tomography: Classification and Automatic Calibration

Optical projection tomography (OPT) is a powerful tool for biomedical studies. It achieves 3D visualization of mesoscopic biological samples with high spatial resolution using conventional tomographic-reconstruction algorithms. However, various artifacts degrade the quality of the reconstructed images due to experimental imperfections in the OPT instruments. While many efforts have been made to characterize and correct for these artifacts, they focus on one specific type of artifacts. This work has two contributions. First, we systematically document a catalog of mechanical artifacts based on a 3D description of the imaging system that uses a set of angular and translational parameters. Then, we introduce a calibration algorithm that recovers the unknown system parameters fed into the final 3D iterative reconstruction algorithm for a distortion-free volumetric image. Simulations with beads data and experimental results on a fluorescent textile fiber confirm that our algorithm successfully removes miscalibration artifacts in the reconstruction.