Prototyping X-ray tomographic reconstruction pipelines with FleXbox

Computer Tomography (CT) scanners for research applications are often designed to facilitate flexible acquisition geometries. Making full use of such CT scanners requires advanced reconstruction software that can (i) deal with a broad range of geometrical scanning settings, (ii) allows for customization of processing algorithms, and (iii) has the capability to process large amounts of data. FleXbox is a Python-based tomographic reconstruction toolbox focused on these three functionalities. It is built to bridge the gap between low-level tomographic reconstruction packages (e.g. ASTRA toolbox) and high-level distributed systems (e.g. Livermore Tomography Tools). FleXbox allows to model arbitrary source, detector and object trajectories. The modular architecture of FleXbox allows to design an optimal reconstruction approach for a single CT dataset. When multiple datasets of an object are acquired (either different spatial regions or different snapshots in time), they can be combined into a larger high resolution volume or a time series of volumes. The software allows to then create a computational reconstruction pipeline that can run without user interaction and enables efficient computation on large-scale 3D volumes on a single workstation