Communications of the ACM
3D Ir Images Now in Full Color
Researchers at Berkeley Lab and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have reported the first full-color infrared tomography.
Credit: Cait Youngquist
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) have combined Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy with computed tomography (CT) to create a non-destructive three-dimensional (3D) imaging technique that provides molecular-level chemical information on biological and other specimens.
"Now we can spectrally identify the specific types of minerals within a piece of bone and assign a color to each type within the 3D reconstructed image," says Berkeley Lab researcher Michael Martin.
This is the first demonstration of FTIR spectro-microtomography, greatly enhancing "the capabilities of both FTIR spectroscopy and CT by creating a full-color spectro-microtomogram in which each voxel contains a complete spectrum [millions of spectra per sample] that provides a wealth of information for advanced spectral segregation techniques such as clustering, neural networks, and principal-component analysis," says UWM's Carol Hirschmugl.
The researchers already have successfully applied FTIR spectro-microtomography to obtain 3D images of the molecular architecture of the cell walls in a flowering plant and in a woody plant. The researchers also applied the technique to study human hair. "The hair study showed that spectral reconstructions can be done on larger fully hydrated biological samples and that we can spectrally identify a fully buried portion of the sample," Hirschmugl says.
From Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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