Tomography involves using an X-ray beam to observe multiple parts of the sample, extracting cross sections (or slices) from them, and then using a computer to reconstruct those slices into a whole. Nikitin is the sole author of a paper explaining TomocuPy, published in the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, though he’s quick to note that he didn’t work in a vacuum: he had help from his APS colleagues (including his group leader, Francesco De Carlo) and he built on previous data reconstruction methods developed to run on central processing units (CPUs).īut Nikitin’s innovations are important, and they involve an understanding of how tomography works: slice by slice. It improves the speed of the process by 20 to 30 times by leveraging computers equipped with graphics processing units (GPUs) and by reconstructing several chunks of data at once. Nikitin’s software package, called TomocuPy, builds on the current tools scientists use for tomography data.

Faster processes have been created for X-ray imaging and for determining important data peaks in X-ray diffraction data, to name a couple.Īrgonne’s Viktor Nikitin, an assistant physicist working at the APS, has now unveiled a new way of reconstructing data taken through a process called tomography.

Data from different X-ray techniques are analyzed in different ways, but Argonne scientists have been working on multiple new methods using artificial intelligence to help speed up the timeline. When the upgraded APS emerges in 2024, they will be able to collect that data at an exponentially faster rate.īut to keep pace with the science, the analysis and reconstruction of that data - which shapes it into a useful form - will also have to get much faster before the APS Upgrade is complete. Scientists use those beams to see ions moving inside batteries, for instance, or to determine the exact protein structure of infectious diseases. The APS is about to undergo an extensive upgrade, one that will increase the brightness of its X-ray beams by up to 500 times. Department of Energy ( DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

This is especially important for scientists working at the Advanced Photon Source ( APS), a U.S. When it comes to X-ray data collection and processing, one goal remains constant: do it faster.

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