X-ray tomography system and method

A system for producing a tomogram, the system comprising:

• an x-ray emitter panel comprising a plurality of x-ray emitters, each emitter configured to emit a respective cone of x-ray radiation;
• an x-ray detector panel comprising a plurality of pixels, the x-ray detector panel spaced from the x-ray emitter panel and configured to produce respective attenuation images in response to each respective cone of x-ray radiation impinging the detector panel from the x-ray emitter panel;
• a spatial location system for identifying relative locations of the emitters and pixels relative to each other;
• and
• a processor for reconstructing a density function indicative of attenuation of the x-ray radiation by:
• selecting a reconstruction slice corresponding to a plane located between the detector and emitter panels;
• providing an array of grid cells on the reconstruction slice;
• in response to selecting the reconstruction slice:
• for each respective attenuation image, back-projecting each pixel in the respective attenuation image back towards the respective emitter for that attenuation image onto the reconstruction slice and determining a proportion of overlap of that back-projected pixel with each grid cell to obtain a plurality of weighting factors comprising a respective weighting factor for each grid cell for that back-projected pixel;
• using the plurality of weighting factors for each back-projected pixel in each attenuation image to calculate an average back-projected intensity for each grid cell in the selected reconstruction slice to produce an average intensity image for the selected reconstruction slice;
• and
• convolving the average intensity image with a ramp filter to obtain the density function within the selected reconstruction slice.