Real Time Tomography at the Swiss Light Source

The penetrating power of X‐rays coupled with the high flux of 3rd generation synchrotron sources makes X‐ray tomography to excel among fast imaging methods . To exploit this asset of synchrotron sources is the motivation for setting up an ultra‐fast tomography endstation at the TOMCAT beamline. The state of the art instruments at synchrotron sources offer routinely a temporal resolution of tens of seconds in tomography. For a number of applications, for example biomedical studies, the relevant time scales (breathing, heartbeat) are rather in the range of 0.5–2 seconds. To overcome motion artifacts when imaging such systems a new ultra‐fast tomographic data acquisition scheme is being developed at the TOMCAT beamline. We can acquire a full set of projections at sub‐second timescale in monochromatic or white‐beam configuration. We present a feasibility study with the ultimate aim to achieve sub‐second temporal resolution in 3D without significant deterioration of the spatial resolution. For the first time, ...