ABSTRACT
Regular assessment of system performance will enable long-term studies to be performed without concerns about the validity of any results obtained from the images. To produce images containing useful information about the tissue or animal under investigation, the intensity of the signal originating from the subject must be greater than that of the background noise. In small animal imaging, there are biological variations between animals, even for genetically identical littermates, that make it difficult to assess if the image is stretched or misaligned. For some imaging and therapy procedures in small animals, ionizing radiation may become an important concern. For x-ray imaging applications, optimizing the imaging parameters to reduce the total exposure time or the intensity of the x-ray beam during the imaging session can reduce the ionizing dose to the animal. Radiation assessment dose resource animal model series has been developed using nonuniform rational B-spline to facilitate dose calculations in preclinical studies.
