Welcome to the Cinemax course: Introduction to advanced tomography. My name is Jens Wenzel Andreasen. I am professor at the Technical University of Denmark, the department of energy conversion and storage. In this course, we are covering all aspects of imaging and modelling of materials microstructure, from data acquisition over 3D reconstruction, segmentation, and modelling to extract the physical parameters of the materials that we would like to investigate. The course take place over four weeks, and we have divided the material up into sort of equal blocks in terms of workload per week. The modules in four weeks, they cover these various aspects of the data analysis procedure. So, in week one, you will get an introduction to tomography. That we'll cover how we acquire topography data, the data acquisition, whether it be from large scale facilities or laboratory scale instruments. You will also hear some examples of what tomography can be used for. As you can see here, there's an arrow going between this block here and the lower block that corresponds to the first module in the honors track, as we call it. This is a track that runs parallel through the course where you get the chance to get more details and go to a more advanced level, and also get the opportunity to work with real hands on exercises yourself, working in Jupyter notebooks. In the first module, you will also be introduced to how to work with Jupyter notebooks, how you can interact with data and how you can do the actual programming of the data analysis. You can of course go back and forth between the tracks throughout the modules to go between the more advanced longer lectures and the shorter introductory lectures. In week two, we move on to actual application cases, the cases that we'll learn you how tomography can be used to learn about physical parameters of the materials cases. These examples will be real world examples. We'll accompanying actual data that you will work with yourself and the lectures will explain you the background for the application cases, the scientific problems that we want to understand, and we will show you how to apply the tomographic reconstructions technique to derive the parameters and the understanding that we want from the materials. In this week, we will also introduce tomographic reconstruction. The actual mathematical operation of reconstructing three dimensional volumes from the projections that we acquire from our materials. Again, in the honors track, we will go in more detail with longer lectures describing the mathematical background, and also exercises in Jupyter notebooks that will enable you to play with what we call toy problems. That is, smaller problems that are relatively fast to reconstruct, where you will do some simple programming yourself in the Jupyter notebooks, that will allow you to interact with the code, to modify it and see the effect of your changes. In week three, we move on to discuss contrast modalities. That means how do X-rays interact with the materials. It can also be other forms of radiation, like neutron radiation or electrons, and we explain how this interaction takes place and creates the contrast that we need in order to image our material and do the actual reconstruction of the material structure in three dimensions. This includes, for example, absorption contrast, which is well known as the contrast modalities used in, for example, CT medical imaging, but also more advanced topics like phase contrast, which again in the honors track, will be covered in great detail, explaining the physical principles behind the contrast modality and how the math applies to the various types. Also in week three, we start working with segmentation, which is the field that covers how to identify and label the various different domains of the 3D volume that we have reconstructed. When we have reconstructed the 3D volume from our projection data, we will have various parts of the volume that represent different colors you could say. The X-ray absorption for example in the material will correspond to various grey levels of contrast, and this we want to assign to different identities, phases, you could say, some physical entities that we would like to investigate further. This identification and labeling of domains in the 3D volume is what we call segmentation. This is also a field that requires a lot of computation, algorithms, mathematical tools, and these are again, of course, covered in much more detail in the honors track, where you will learn the mathematical background for the various segmentation techniques. You will also again get the opportunity to work with the practical examples, the real application cases in Jupyter notebooks. Finally in week four, we get to the point where we have an identified labelel 3D volume of various phases and physical domains. What we want to learn is how do these various parts, the segmented parts, the domains of the volume, how do they affect the material properties? To this end, we apply modelling of our 3D volume at this stage. This we do in order to build a model that will tell us about how the mechanical properties are affected by the structure of the materials, or for example how to liquids or gases interact with the material, as it flow through the porosity of the material. This type of modelling can be done with various methods. Oftentimes, it is methods like finite element modelling. This is also covered in week four, and especially in the honors track where there is a lot of material, and also accompanying exercises that allow you to, again, from the ground-up program, from the beginning, small problems that are relatively easy to compute, and that you can interact with and see how you can extract the parameters that you need from your model. You also here get lectures that show how the modelling methods can be applied to the real case applications. In this final honors track model, there is quite a lot of material covering to a very advanced level all the aspects of finite element modelling and applications, and again, with accompanying exercises. What we require of you to get a diploma is only the first couple of exercises. But if you are interested, you are very welcome to dive into this large material to go deeper and work through all of the exercises. Throughout this introduction, I have used the word "We" a lot, but of course, I'm not alone in teaching this course. My role in this course is to guide you through various modules and themes as we go through the workflow. At various points, I will introduce lectures and at times, I will also point your attention to the learning objectives, and how they connect to the modules, and how the modules connect together. In the end, I hope you have enjoyed the experience and got the maximum benefit of seeing these lectures given by international world leading experts in the topics. I hope you also take the opportunity and enjoy the chance to work with exercises that will allow you to get hands-on experience with real world application examples, and that will give you a personal experience with how to handle data and work with this kind of data.
