The importance of routine quality control for reproducible pulmonary measurements by in vivo micro-CT

Micro-computed tomography (CT) imaging provides densitometric and functional assessment of lung diseases in animal models, playing a key role either in understanding disease progression or in drug discovery studies. The generation of reliable and reproducible experimental data is strictly dependent on a system’s stability. Quality controls (QC) are essential to monitor micro-CT performance but, although QC procedures are standardized and routinely employed in clinical practice, detailed guidelines for preclinical imaging are lacking. In this work, we propose a routine QC protocol for in vivo micro-CT, based on three commercial phantoms. To investigate the impact of a detected scanner drift on image post-processing, a retrospective analysis using twenty-two healthy mice was performed and lung density histograms used to compare the area under curve (AUC), the skewness and the kurtosis before and after the drift. As expected, statistically significant differences were found for all the selected parameters [AUC 532 ± 31 vs. 420 ± 38 (p < 0.001); skewness 2.3 ± 0.1 vs. 2.5 ± 0.1 (p < 0.001) and kurtosis 4.2 ± 0.3 vs. 5.1 ± 0.5 (p < 0.001)], confirming the importance of the designed QC procedure to obtain a reliable longitudinal quantification of disease progression and drug efficacy evaluation.