A projection selection method to improve image quality in optical projection tomography.

Optical projection tomography (OPT) is a very important imaging tool for a mesoscopic-scale. It can provide three dimensional (3D) transmission and emission imaging. However, high-resolution OPT is limited in depth of field (DOF) due to a high numerical aperture, which causes a poor performance of OPT in imaging large samples. Moreover, it is difficult to tune the focus plane (FP) to a fixed position where OPT always has the best image quality in different directions. To address these problems, we developed a projection selection method to improve DOF in OPT. In each direction, our method automatically selects the best projection from several projections with different FP. Then, we use a series of selected projections for 3D reconstruction. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can improve the image quality comparing to a fixed FP. Moreover, our method is flexible to be used in other OPT setups by adding a linear stage.