Reconstruction strategy suited to x-ray diffraction tomography

In the past, filtered backprojection has been successfully applied to the problem of reconstructing images from x-ray diffraction tomographic data; however, this technique is applicable only under conditions of low x-ray attenuation. We present a more suitable reconstruction strategy for x-ray diffraction tomography, which corrects for x-ray attenuation by using the maps of the linear attenuation coefficient that are generated by x-ray transmission computed tomography. Previously, neither the iterative reconstruction approaches nor attenuation corrections had been applied to x-ray diffraction tomographic data. A Monte Carlo simulation study of photon transport is utilized for evaluating the efficacy of the attenuation-corrected iterative reconstruction algorithm.