Toward a Flexible and Portable CT Scanner

The very hot and power-hungry x-ray filaments in today's computed tomography (CT) scanners constrain their design to be big and stationary. What if we built a CT scanner that could be deployed at the scene of a car accident to acquire tomographic images before moving the victim? Recent developments in nanotechnology have shown that carbon nanotubes can produce x-rays at room temperature, and with relatively low power needs. We propose a design for a portable and flexible CT scanner made up of an addressable array of tiny x-ray emitters and detectors. In this paper, we outline a basic design, propose a strategy for reconstruction, and demonstrate the concept using a software simulation of the scanner. We also raise a number of issues that still need to be overcome to build such a scanner.