Plastic beads (3D)

Introduction

In this hands-on tutorial, we will take a look at how we can use RECASTX to explore a 3D dataset from a static tomography scan.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes you have already followed our installation guide to install the reconstruction server and the GUI client on a server machine and a client machine, respectively. You will also need to install foamstream on the server machine in order to stream the data from files.

We are going to use the plastic beeds dataset offered by TomoBank. Go to the homepage, and then navigate to Datasets/KBLT and download the file 2_plastic_beeds_RGB.h5. You can also find the description of the dataset there.

Running

Streaming the data

Open a terminal and run:

foamstream-tomo --datafile <Your/folder/2_plastic_beeds_RGB.h5> --pdata tomo --pflat flat

You can find the shapes of the Dark, Flat and Projection images from the output of foamstream.

Starting the reconstruction server

Open another terminal and run:

recastx-recon

Note

The volume-size, which defines the resolution of the "low-resolution" volume, is set to 512 in this case. As a result, the resolution of the reconstructed volume is indeed high. It should be noted that it thus takes longer time to perform the reconstruction and send the reconstructed volume from the server to the client. Therefore, the default value of volume-size is set to 128 and is recommended to use in dynamic tomography.

Starting the GUI client

Open a terminal and run:

recastx-gui

Set the following parameters in the GUI:

Set Column Count, Row Count and Angle Count to 130, 400 and 200, respectively.
Tick 360 degree radio button.
Set Volume Size to 512.
Set X range and Y range to [-256, 256].

Make sure the SCAN MODE is set to Discrete and click the Process button.

Beads slices — Three orthogonal high-resolution slices