Free-form deformation in tomographic reconstruction. Application to attenuation map reconstruction

The authors address the issue of using deformable models to reconstruct an unknown attenuation map of the torso from transmission scans. They focus on the reconstruction of a piecewise-uniform attenuation coefficients distribution. They represent the unknown distribution by a set of closed surfaces defining regions having the same attenuating properties. They show how free-form deformations allow one to deform a complex attenuation map template to match a set of transmission scans. The deformability of the model and the accurate estimation of the attenuating properties are closely studied in this paper