Development of low cost gamma tomography system for industrial applications

An innovative reseach work has been succesfully completed by creating low cost gamma computed tomography system for industrial application. The first hand-made scanner apparatus for parallel beam tomographic system using one source - one detector has been built in the laboratory of the Center for Isotopes and Radiation Application (CIRA) - BATAN. A dedicated executable software based on LabView© platform has also been created for data acquisition and for image reconstruction of projections. The scanner has been tested experimentally in the laboratory by scanning soft and hard objects. A Cs-137 gamma source with activity of 30 mCi and NaI(Tl) radiation detector were used in this experiment for measuring transmitted radiation intensity from series measurements with angle interval were 5o and 2.5o respectively. The first tomographic images of the scanned objects have been reconstructed using filtered-back projection (FBP) algorithm developed by the authors. Poor spatial resolution of the images were due to inherent artifacts and limitation number of projections. We believe that the low cost gamma tomograhy system developed by BATAN's researchers will reduce dependence of research activities to commersial tomography equipment that are expensive, complex and sometimes unfriendly.