Novel X-ray Interferometry Imaging of Plant Root Systems
EMSL Project ID
60183
Abstract
Plants have mechanisms to overcome abiotic and biotic stresses. One of the main plant parts to adjust to available resources for growth are roots. Observing the changes in distribution of roots (RSA) of a plant non-invasively during plant growth will help in developing stress tolerant varieties of crop. We will investigate an analyzer-less modulated phase grating (MPG) X-ray interferometry for imaging the RSA for low-dose tri-modal CT imaging. Regular CT (attenuation contrast) imaging enables non-destructive investigation of the RSA in soil or soil-like media, without excavation, allowing continued root growth which can be observed over a period of plant growth. However, RSA is challenging to segment from background-soil in CT images. CT may even require special clay for imaging for adequate contrast. Additionally, CT dosage to the root system has to be limited not to impede plant growth. Propagation based (no grating) imaging (PBI) using synchrotron source provided bi-modal images: attenuation and differential phase contrast (DPC) for RSA, the DPC with higher contrast. For other applications, PBI have shown to reduce dose orders of magnitude compared to CT alone. But PBI systems are sensitive to focal spot blur, need special sources, different geometry for absorption and phase image acquisition. We propose to image RSA with MPG grating based interferometry system that will yield tri-modal information of attenuation images (CT) and phase image (DPC) as well as small angle scattering SAXS (not captured by PBI systems), simultaneously. Part of the LSU team (Dr. Dey and a graduate student, Dr. Ham and Dr. Butler) will test a portable (and removable) low-dose MPG interferometry system on a PNNL CT system, Nikon XTH CT for plant root imaging. Our hypothesis is that the MPG system will close the gap of current CT imaging of RSA to allow high contrast imaging at estimated half the dose than CT alone. It will provide three-modalities (CT, DPC and SAXS), for regular assessment of plant RSA. The DPC & SAXS may provide supplementary information for understanding RSA development and plant responses to environmental stresses. Our goals are (1) Test RSA of plants grown in (1.8cm diameter) plastic tubes, with two existing 25 keV MPGs at low energies similar to that used in PBI system Karunakaran et al, Sci Rep, 2015. (2) Test “edge-on” gratings, with higher design-energy built at Nano Fabrication Facility, LSU. These will enable us to image roots grown in pots (5cm diameter) at 120-200kVp. For each of these low and high energy studies, we will acquire 3D trimodal tomographic images at different doses and compare to CT (no gratings).Project Details
Project type
Exploratory Research
Start Date
2021-12-01
End Date
2022-09-30
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Co-Investigator(s)
Team Members