Portable x-ray computed tomography

Abstract

A portable x-ray computed tomography (CT) system may utilize algebraic reconstruction techniques (ART) to produce 3D volume images from tens of shots or less. The system may be deployed as desired where x-ray source and detector positions are not known beforehand. A fast, accurate matrix may be formed relating voxels to detector pixels via a modified ray tracing algorithm, eliminating artifacts caused by approaches using rough approximations. Masking or recombination may be performed to remove detector pixels that are not part of a region of interest (ROI) or lump the pixels together as one unknown, significantly reducing matrix size, and hence, computation time. The positions and orientations of the x-ray source and detector may be treated as unknowns and refined to optimize a volume image metric. For example, the optimized metric could be image contrast, image sparsity, or total variation.

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