Towards a high-resolution local tomography using statistical iterative reconstruction

Synchrotron radiation (SR) x-ray micro-CT is an effective method for high-resolution imaging of small objects with several applications in biology and industry. However, the detector field of view is tiny, which limits the sample size to a few millimeters. When the sample size is larger than the limited field of view, reconstructed images, using conventional methods, known to suffer from DC-shift and low-frequency artifacts. This problem is known as local tomography or interior problem. In this paper we introduce a statistical iterative image reconstruction method to eliminate image artifacts produced from local tomography. The proposed method can be used in several SR imaging applications to enable a high resolution of the scanned object while preserving the image quality from artifacts produced due to the local tomography problem.