Towards dynamic feedback control during time-resolved CT at TOMCAT

Tomographic X-ray microscopy beamlines at synchrotron light sources worldwide have pushed the achievable time-resolution for dynamic 3D structural investigations down to a fraction of a second, allowing the study of quickly evolving systems. The large data rates involved impose heavy demands on computational resources, making it difficult to readily process and interrogate the resulting volumes. The data acquisition is thus performed essentially blindly making it hard to timely notice problems with the measurement protocol or sample conditions, potentially rendering the acquired data unusable. Researchers from the CWI in Amsterdam have developed an efficient approach to address this issue based on the real-time reconstruction, visualisation and on-the-fly analysis of a small number of arbitrarily oriented slices. This solution, requiring only a single additional computing workstation, has been coupled to the GigaFRoST detector and implemented at the TOMCAT beamline of the Swiss Light Source. The system is able to process multiple sets of slices per second, thus pushing the reconstruction throughput on the same level as the data acquisition. This enables the monitoring of dynamic processes as they occur and represents the next crucial step towards adaptive feedback control of time-resolved in situ tomographic experiments.