A high-throughput x-ray microtomography system at the Advanced

~Received 14 November 2000; accepted for publication 23 January 2001!A third-generation synchrotron radiation source provides enough brilliance to acquire completetomographic data sets at 100 nm or better resolution in a few minutes. To take advantage of suchhigh-brilliance sources at the Advanced Photon Source, we have constructed a pipelined dataacquisition and reconstruction system that combines a fast detector system, high-speed datanetworks, and massively parallel computers to rapidly acquire the projection data and perform thereconstruction and rendering calculations. With the current setup, a data set can be obtained andreconstructed in tens of minutes. A specialized visualization computer makes renderedthree-dimensional~3D! images available to the beamline users minutes after the data acquisition iscompleted. This system is capable of examining a large number of samples at sub-mm 3D resolutionor studying the full 3D structure of a dynamically evolving sample on a 10 min temporal scale. Inthe near future, we expect to increase the spatial resolution to below 100 nm by using zone-platex-ray focusing optics and to improve the time resolution by the use of a broadband x-raymonochromator and a faster detector system. © 2001 American Institute of Physics.@DOI: 10.1063/1.1355270#