A range description for the planar circular Radon transform

The transform considered in the paper integrates a function supported in the unit disk on the plane over all circles centered at the boundary of this disk. Such circular Radon transform arises in several contemporary imaging techniques, as well as in other applications. As it is common for transforms of Radon type, its range has infinite co-dimension in standard function spaces. Range descriptions for such transforms are known to be very important for computed tomography, for instance when dealing with incomplete data, error correction, and other issues. A complete range description for the circular Radon transform is obtained. Range conditions include the recently found set of moment type conditions, which happens to be incomplete, as well as the rest of conditions that have less standard form. In order to explain the procedure better, a similar (non-standard) treatment of the range conditions is described first for the usual Radon transform on the plane.Comment: submitted for publicatio

On the injectivity of the circular Radon transform arising in thermoacoustic tomography

The circular Radon transform integrates a function over the set of all spheres with a given set of centers. The problem of injectivity of this transform (as well as inversion formulas, range descriptions, etc.) arises in many fields from approximation theory to integral geometry, to inverse problems for PDEs, and recently to newly developing types of tomography. The article discusses known and provides new results that one can obtain by methods that essentially involve only the finite speed of propagation and domain dependence for the wave equation.Comment: To appear in Inverse Problem

A series solution and a fast algorithm for the inversion of the spherical mean Radon transform

An explicit series solution is proposed for the inversion of the spherical mean Radon transform. Such an inversion is required in problems of thermo- and photo- acoustic tomography. Closed-form inversion formulae are currently known only for the case when the centers of the integration spheres lie on a sphere surrounding the support of the unknown function, or on certain unbounded surfaces. Our approach results in an explicit series solution for any closed measuring surface surrounding a region for which the eigenfunctions of the Dirichlet Laplacian are explicitly known - such as, for example, cube, finite cylinder, half-sphere etc. In addition, we present a fast reconstruction algorithm applicable in the case when the detectors (the centers of the integration spheres) lie on a surface of a cube. This algorithm reconsrtucts 3-D images thousands times faster than backprojection-type methods

Artifacts in incomplete data tomography - with applications to photoacoustic tomography and sonar

We develop a paradigm using microlocal analysis that allows one to characterize the visible and added singularities in a broad range of incomplete data tomography problems. We give precise characterizations for photo- and thermoacoustic tomography and Sonar, and provide artifact reduction strategies. In particular, our theorems show that it is better to arrange Sonar detectors so that the boundary of the set of detectors does not have corners and is smooth. To illustrate our results, we provide reconstructions from synthetic spherical mean data as well as from experimental photoacoustic data