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Dryad

Data from: Optical projection tomography implemented for accessibility and low cost (OPTImAL)

Abstract

Optical projection tomography (OPT) is a 3D mesoscopic imaging modality that can utilise absorption or fluorescence contrast and is widely applied to fixed and live samples in the mm-cm scale. We present OPTImAL, an open-source research-grade implementation of modular OPT hardware and software that has been designed to be widely accessible by using low-cost components, including LED excitation and cooled CMOS cameras. Both the hardware and software are modular and flexible in their implementation, enabling rapid switching between sample size scales and supporting compressive sensing to reconstruct images from undersampled sparse OPT data, e.g., to facilitate rapid imaging with low photobleaching/phototoxicity. We also explore a simple implementation of focal scanning OPT to achieve higher resolution, which entails the use of a fan-beam geometry reconstruction method to account for variation in magnification.