Visualization of guinea pig cochleae with computed tomography of diffraction enhanced imaging and comparison with histology

As a novel imaging method, X-ray diffraction enhanced imaging (DEI) has extremely high sensitivity for weakly absorbing biological soft tissues. Recently, biomedical application research about DEI and computed tomography of DEI (DEI-CT) has become a hot issue. In this paper, a novel visualization method of micro biomedical structures is presented, which uses DEI-CT techniques to study guinea pig cochleae. The acquired DO images clearly displayed the spiral structures and inner details of the guinea pig cochleae. DEI-CT reconstructions were obtained from the peak projection data and refraction angle projection data of guinea pig cochleae. Based on DEI-CT reconstructions, we implemented three-dimensional visualization of guinea pig cochleae. Moreover, visualization of guinea pig cochlea based on color images of the histological sections was performed for comparison with the results of DEI-CT. The advantages and limitations of the two methods in visualizing guinea pig cochleae are also discussed. This study demonstrates that DEI-CT is an effective method to visualize the biomedical micro-organs and minute tissues with a good contrast and spatial resolution.