Research Needs and Opportunities for Micro-CT of Microcirculatory Structure and Function

Figure 1 [1] There are two levels of CT imaging small animals – miniand micro-CT. Mini-CT has a voxel resolution that is equivalent to whole body CT of the adult human. Thus, a 30 cm diameter human chest is represented with up to 500 pixels clinically, so a 2 cm mouse chest would be represented by 500, 40, μm pixels. Higher resolution scans at the microscopic level are truly micro-CT scans. I will be talking primarily about mini-CT image analysis of the microvasculature, although occasionally I will refer to the need for micro-CT imaging.