EM tomographic image reconstruction using polar voxels

The splitting of the field of view (FOV) in polar voxels is proposed in this work in order to obtain an efficient description of a cone-beam computed tomography (CT) scanner. The proposed symmetric-polar pixelation makes it possible to deal with the 3D iterative reconstruction considering a number of projections and voxel sizes typical in CT preclinical imaging. The performance comparison, between the filtered backprojection (FBP) and 3D maximum likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM) reconstruction algorithm for CT, is presented. It is feasible to achieve the hardware spatial resolution limit with the considered pixelation. The image quality achieved with MLEM and FBP have been analyzed. The results obtained with both algorithms in clinical images have been compared too. Although the polar-symmetric pixelation is presented in the context of CT imaging, it can be applied to any other tomographic technique as long as the scan comprises the measurement of an object under several projection angles.