Towards In-Vivo X-Ray Nanoscopy

X-ray microscopy is a powerful imaging technique that permits the investigation of specimen on nanoscale with resolution of up to 700 nm in 3-D. In the context of bio-medical research this is a promising technology that allows to study the microstructure of biological tissues. However, X-ray microscopy (XRM) systems are not designed for in-vivo applications and are mainly used in the field of material sciences in which dose is irrelevant. High resolution scans may take up to 10 hours. Our long-term goal is to utilize this modality to study the effects of disease dynamics and treatment in-vivo on mice bones. Therefore, a first step towards this ambitious goal is to evaluate the current state-of-the-art to determine the required system parameters. In this work, we investigate the impact of different XRM settings on the image quality. By changing various acquisition parameters such as exposure time, voltage, current and number of projections, we simulate the outcome of XRM scans, while reducing the X-ray energy. We base our simulations on a high resolution ex-vivo scan of a mouse tibia. The resulting reconstructions are evaluated qualitatively as well as quantitatively by calculating the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). We demonstrate that we can reach comparable image quality while reducing the total X-ray energy which forms a foundation towards the upcoming experiments.