GigaFRoST: the gigabit fast readout system for tomography.

Owing to recent developments in CMOS technology, it is now possible to exploit tomographic microscopy at third-generation synchrotron facilities with unprecedented speeds. Despite this rapid technical progress, one crucial limitation for the investigation of realistic dynamic systems has remained: a generally short total acquisition time at high frame rates due to the limited internal memory of available detectors. To address and solve this shortcoming, a new detection and readout system, coined GigaFRoST, has been developed based on a commercial CMOS sensor, acquiring and streaming data continuously at 7.7 GB s-1 directly to a dedicated backend server. This architecture allows for dynamic data pre-processing as well as data reduction, an increasingly indispensable step considering the vast amounts of data acquired in typical fast tomographic experiments at synchrotron beamlines (up to several tens of TByte per day of raw data).

Towards on-the-fly data post-processing for real-time tomographic imaging at TOMCAT.

Sub-second full-field tomographic microscopy at third-generation synchrotron sources is a reality, opening up new possibilities for the study of dynamic systems in different fields. Sustained elevated data rates of multiple GB/s in tomographic experiments will become even more common at diffraction-limited storage rings, coming in operation soon. The computational tools necessary for the post-processing of raw tomographic projections have generally not experienced the same efficiency increase as the experimental facilities, hindering optimal exploitation of this new potential. We present here a fast, flexible, and user-friendly post-processing pipeline overcoming this efficiency mismatch and delivering reconstructed tomographic datasets just few seconds after the data have been acquired, enabling fast parameter and image quality evaluation as well as efficient post-processing of TBs of tomographic data. With this new tool, also able to accept a stream of data directly from a detector, few selected tomographic slices are available in less than half a second, providing advanced previewing capabilities paving the way to new concepts for on-the-fly control of dynamic experiments.