CTT: Tools for Fine Alignment of Flash X-ray Systems

Abstract

The CTT code is a compilation of the python code that was prototyped in the interest of making a method for fine alignment of Flash X-ray Systems at the lab. It contains python code for interacting with LTT and running optimization loops using LTT simulations or ray tracing with RaySpace. It Includes classes for creating phantom objects and modular geometry objects in the simulations. It allows one to generate a random phantom that has been optimized to stay with a certain cubic volume and maximize the minimum distance between any two ball phantom centers in all projections. It was primarily made to work on ball phantoms which were simulated as Teflon spheres. It allows the alignment from some nominal position to some displaced position to simulate recovery of a real geometry from the nominal geometry of the system. Fine alignment can be done with the projections in LTT while a rough alignment is faster using rayspace. If rayspace works well for the use case it should be preferred since it is considerably faster and less resource intensive in general. Some Notes about using this code is that one will have to edit the imports for the files to get to the correct LTT path, LTT GUI path and to the CTT path when importing. This was made by using anaconda with python 3 on windows 10. The LTT code was stored in a anaconda environment which seemed to help the python find the LTT although it shouldn’t be necessary if you append the path in your code using sys.path.append(r'add the path you want here’). The sys.path.append method is a quick way to give your python code access to a given folder when running it (such as LTT or CTT). Note that since the code was originally made with paths for a specific machine that a new user will have to edit those paths to make it work in all the files that use the old paths. This is somewhat tedious but will be required to run the code on a new machine. The methodology used to run and make these notebooks starts with opening a command prompt as administrator in windows 10. After this one would activate the anaconda environment in the appropriate directory using “conda activate myenv” in the command prompt. After this open a jupyter-notebook using the keyword “jupyter-notebook". After that a notebook should open in a browser. Note that some libraries used may not come with anaconda so those may have to be installed. There shouldn’t be much though since the main things used are scipy, numpy, matplotlib, and LTT. LTTQuicksetup also requires some paths that will be specific to the computer so that should be changed as well.