Last
Updated 03/08/2002

Falcon's Argonne Experience

My task at Argonne\
National Laboratory in Illinois was to develop an application
to run an X-Ray/CT system. In an X-Ray/CT system, you take side shots
of an object and then reconstruct a view of the image. For example, the
image below was not photographed from above, but was instead scanned
from the side, rotating the image a small degree each time. These side
shots were then combined to produce the below view. The reason that
this can be done is because an X-Ray image shows the density of the
object being scanned. Using complex algorithms, these density graphs
can then be combined to produce a 3D likeness of the image.

The environment that I used for development was LabView
4.01. The camera was an 8-bit Sony CCD. The frame grabber card was a
PCI-IMAQ (image acquisition) card from National Instruments. The
platform was a Pentium 150 with 128MB RAM. The stage was controlled by
a Parker Compumotor system and had four axes of motion. The OS was
Windows 95.

The image reconstruction was handled by existing routines
that had been written in FORTRAN 77 and had been recompiled for the
32-bit OS.

Here is the first composite image that was produced on the
completed system. The object was a plastic composite that had been
produced on a rapid prototype machine. The design is the official ANL
logo.