Transverse tomography with incoherent optical reconstruction

Abstract
A thin layer of an object can be imaged by reconstruction from a so-called sinogram. It is produced by an X-ray fan beam rotating around the object while a recording film is moved in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the fan beam. Before reconstruction the sinogram image is convoluted according to a special function to remove artifacts consisting of spurious shadows between different object elements. The reconstruction is done from the convoluted sinogram by means of a back projector, which operates according to a principle that is the reverse of the recording of the original sinogram. Tomograms of phantoms, pork chops and the head of a dog show that the process is capable of high spatial resolution but is limited by low contrast.