13 September 2024
CoSec 2024 Impact Award Winner!
Congratulations to Dr Thomas Zillhardt from the Diamond Light Source for winning the CoSeC impact award! Dr Zillhardt was chosen by an external panel for his work on Quantum Digital Tomosynthesis.
Based at the University of Manchester, and in partnership with Adaptix Ltd and Kromek Plc, Dr Zillhardt is responsible for a project to design, assemble and test the first hyperspectral X-ray tomosynthesis scanner. This fast virtual serial sectioning modality makes use of recently developed flat panel X-ray sources, whist hyperspectral X-ray imaging is made possible with new direct-conversion photon counting detectors.
"I early on started getting involved in activities organised by the CCPi team, including the workshop at the IOP and the hackathon in Cambridge. Whether on events or online, I received support from the CCPi team to better understand the algorithms and debug my code."
Dr Thomas Zillhardt, Diamond Light Source
There is an immediate benefit to the research community, as two new hyperspectral scanners using the code developed with CIL are now part of the National X-ray Computed Tomography (NXCT). These prototypes are available for research and testing within the UK scientific community. They use slightly different technologies, with one being dedicated to the life sciences and the other for Non-Destructive Imaging (NDT). With scan times down to a few minutes with very-low operational costs, they are an ideal tool for researchers and students to have a quick look inside their samples with material and tissue discrimination. As they are prototypes, further development is currently being carried out to improve image quality and automatic segmentation routines aided with IA. These prototypes are also suitable for outreach projects as they are easy and safe to use, almost as readily as a 3D printer.
Quantum Digital Tomosynthesis (QDT), empowered by CIL, offers the ability to differentiate materials and tissue types, providing reliable results in minutes directly inside the operating theatre. This has the potential to reduce re-excision rates by offering accurate visualisation of resection margins in excised tissue, thereby reducing re-excision rates and with-it decreasing patient stress, improving patient outcome, and lowering costs to hospital services.These tools are equally applicable to the areas of engineering and materials science, with the second prototype, and with opportunities in Additive Manufacturing (AM), battery quality control and digital twining. Indeed, X-ray CT and material characterisation has showed both structural and chemical quality issues in commercial batteries, however this required disassembly. QDT is capable of fast non-destructive characterisation on many samples, providing statistics on the quantity and nature of defects other quality control measures fail to identify.
Research has demonstrated that metrology with conventional X-ray imaging of AM parts is affected by subjective interpretations, bias and inappropriate experimental parameters, all of which can be compensated with this advanced modality. Reverse engineering using micro-CT has allowed the improvement of AM processes by deforming the associated CAD model, and QDT can probe for impurities and production defects, in a much shorter timeframe than conventional CT.
