In this article, we present an X-ray tomographic imaging method that is well suited for pulmonary disease studies in animal models to resolve the full pathway from gas intake to gas exchange. Current state-of-the-art synchrotron-based tomographic phase-contrast imaging methods allow for three-dimensional microscopic imaging data to be acquired non-destructively in scan times of the order of seconds with good soft tissue contrast. However, when studying multi-scale hierarchically structured objects, such as the mammalian lung, the overall sample size typically exceeds the field of view illuminated by the X-rays in a single scan and the necessity for achieving a high spatial resolution conflicts with the need to image the whole sample. Several image stitching and calibration techniques to achieve extended high-resolution fields of view have been reported, but those approaches tend to fail when imaging non-stable samples, thus precluding tomographic measurements of large biological samples, which are prone to degradation and motion during extended scan times. In this work, we demonstrate a full-volume three-dimensional reconstruction of an intact rat lung under immediate post-mortem conditions and at an isotropic voxel size of (2.75 µm)³. We present the methodology for collecting multiple local tomographies with 360° extended field of view scans followed by locally non-rigid volumetric stitching. Applied to the lung, it allows to resolve the entire pulmonary structure from the trachea down to the parenchyma in a single dataset. The complete dataset is available online (https://doi.org/10.16907/7eb141d3-11f1-47a6-9d0e-76f8832ed1b2).

在本文中，我们提出了一种非常适合动物模型肺部疾病研究的 X 射线断层扫描成像方法，以解析从气体摄入到气体交换的完整途径。当前最先进的基于同步加速器的断层扫描相衬成像方法允许在几秒钟的扫描时间内无损地获取三维显微成像数据，并具有良好的软组织对比度。然而，在研究多尺度分层结构物体（例如哺乳动物肺）时，整体样本大小通常超过单次扫描中 X 射线照射的视野，并且实现高空间分辨率的必要性与需求相冲突。对整个样本进行成像。已经报道了几种实现扩展高分辨率视场的图像拼接和校准技术，但是这些方法在对不稳定样本进行成像时往往会失败，因此无法对大型生物样本进行断层扫描测量，这些样本在扩展过程中容易退化和运动。扫描次数。在这项工作中，我们展示了在立即死后条件下和各向同性体素大小 (2.75 µm) 下完整大鼠肺的全体积三维重建³ . 我们提出了用于收集多个局部断层扫描的方法，该方法具有 360° 扩展视野扫描，然后是局部非刚性体积缝合。应用于肺，它允许在单个数据集中解析从气管到实质的整个肺结构。完整的数据集可在线获取（https://doi.org/10.16907/7eb141d3-11f1-47a6-9d0e-76f8832ed1b2）。