International Journal of Biomedical Imaging
Volume 2009 (2009), Article ID 534516, 8 pages
doi:10.1155/2009/534516
Research Article
Line-Source Based X-Ray Tomography
1Biomedical Imaging Division, VT-WFU School of Biomedical Engineering & Sciences, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, USA
2Biomedical Engineering Department, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, USA
3Biomedical Imaging Division, VT-WFU School of Biomedical
Engineering & Sciences, Virginia Tech., Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
4School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019, USA
5Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109, USA
Received 12 September 2008; Accepted 1 February 2009
Academic Editor: Yibin Zheng
Copyright © 2009 Deepak Bharkhada et al. This is an open access article distributed under the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Current computed tomography (CT) scanners, including micro-CT scanners, utilize a point x-ray source. As we target higher and higher spatial resolutions, the reduced x-ray focal spot size limits the temporal and contrast resolutions achievable. To overcome this limitation, in this paper we propose to use a line-shaped x-ray source so that many more photons can be generated, given a data acquisition interval. In reference to the simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (SART) algorithm for image reconstruction from projection data generated by an x-ray point source, here we develop a generalized SART algorithm for image reconstruction from projection data generated by an x-ray line source. Our numerical simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of our novel line-source based x-ray CT approach and the proposed generalized SART algorithm.