[guhidalg]

I've seen slightly better scans from the Lumafield machine I have access to at $DAYJOB, but only slightly better. The scans shown here are very high quality.

You don't get access to raw data, assuming you mean something like individual X-ray images. The service runs the tomography on some cluster in the cloud and you get access to the reconstruction through a web app.

[GranPC]

The scans you see on this website are from Lumafield machines, so that does check out.

[endisneigh]

Radiologist?

[guhidalg]

No, I am a software engineer at a writing instruments company... long story.

[endisneigh]

Oh interesting. The writing instrument company needs scans this good?

[guhidalg]

Yes, and I wish it was even more accurate :)

Doing metrology on production parts normally means disassembling them and putting them under the microscope or X-raying them, but sometimes there are problems that only manifest when the pen is assembled and closed. There's a lot of geometry that isn't visible externally in a pen, more so in certain markers. The writing systems are very sensitive to manufacturing tolerances, and out of spec parts are perceived by users as a bad pen or marker (which we don't want). With a normal X-ray, it is very difficult to resolve internal geometry deep in the assembled pen with any degree of accuracy.

CT scans allow us to examine internal geometry non-destructively and they are relatively fast to run. The scans shown in that blog post I would guess took about 6-8 hours of scanning + 1 hour of reconstruction to generate. Once you start the machine, it's completely automated from there, so you don't need a technician or an engineer sitting at the X-ray machine (which BTW is running Windows XP or something worse) takings images of parts.