Study of large axial space rebinning algorithm in γ-photon industrial tomography image reconstruction

The accuracy of the existing single slice and Fourier rebinning algorithms depends on the projection angle of the line of response. The increase of such projection angle with the detector size, typical in the large axial space of γ-photon industrial detection, and the loss of some projection data after rebinning, result in the degradation of the image quality. In addition, those algorithms consider the probability of positron annihilation equally distributed along the line of response, which prevents to estimate accurately the positions of the annihilation point, and can originate artifacts and noise in the reconstructed image. In this work, we propose an alternative large axial space rebinning algorithm. In that algorithm, initially the line of response is divided into transverse and axial components. Then, each line of response is uniformly rebinned into all the 2D sinogram data intersecting with it. To improve the accuracy of the estimate of the annihilation point location and suppress the noise effectively, we assign a Gaussian weight coefficient to the projection data, and optimise the rebinning algorithm with it. Finally, we reconstruct the image on the basis of the 2D sinograms with the optimised weights. On the computational side, the algorithm is also accelerated by making use of parallel computing. Both simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method improves the contrast and spatial resolution of 2D reconstructed images. Furthermore, the reconstruction time is not affected by the new method, which is therefore expected to meet the demand of γ-photon industrial inspection imaging.