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History and Features
XRaySim is currently beta software. It started as a quiet spinoff from
an undergraduate research effort. Initially, XRaySim was written in
BASIC with a DirectX wrapper for performing simple visualization and to
validate some reconstruction algorithms that were being
developed for X-ray tomography at the CNDE. Slowly over time,
it evolved into a very complex system and has finally reached a
user-friendly state with the current release.
XRaySim was open-sourced well over a year ago, with the aim of getting
people involved in its further development. This was at a time when it
had already outlasted its initial requirement. The idea was to
develop a system that would help other research groups around the world
with their simulations - be it either in medical imaging or Industrial
CT. To this end, the algorithms behind XRaySim have been
generalized to work with any sort of data. Some of the primary features
that XRaySim boasts of include:
- Seamless cross-compatibility with commercial
CAD packages - Tested with Pro/Engineer WildfireŽ and AutoCADŽ
- Simulate defects/ anomalies in materials, combine
several parts as required and setup custom scenes for scan simulations
through an intuitive and easy-to-use interface
- Custom material definitions -
- Define custom materials and their
properties via material scripts and XRaySim will load them automatically
- Easy to use script language - Material definitions
are written in an external script file with an extremely simple syntax.
This system is generic enough to be extended for use with scenes and
object positioning
- Handles very complex objects - Tested with very
complex meshes with millions of triangles, the pushing power of the
graphics card is the only limiting factor
- Energy spectra calculations - load custom energy
spectra or use standard models for simulating source characterstics,
including bremsstrahlung spectra
- Define detector characteristics - flat panels or
imaging films, depending on the desired image response
- Varied scan geometries
- Tomography scan simulations - generate tomography
data on customized planes for cross section reconstruction
- Radiography simulation - obtain 2D radiographic
images at complex orientations, easily achieved using the realtime
preview window
- High-res scans - Scan simulations with a very high
resolution (of upto 2048 x 2048) in addition to a realtime scan
preview. Scan images can be exported for use with external image
analysis software
- Cross-platform functionality
XRaySim v0.7 is the first official beta release. Earlier versions
of the package were alpha releases, and are available from the Sourceforge
project page. Please note that all of these are deprecated
and have significantly limited functionality when compared to the
current release. The alpha versions were meant to serve as a sample to
help people write their own code for performing radiography
simulations, and were (initially) not intended for general use.
This motive has now changed with the beta release, which offers a
significant revamp of the user interface and also
features additional functioanlity. Apart from the source
release, self-installing pre-compiled binaries are also available for
the Windows platform. Platform-specific compiling instructions can be
found on the documentation page
on this site. |
