Network Flow Algorithms for Discrete Tomography

Tomography is a powerful technique to obtain images of the interior of an object in a nondestructive way. First, a series of projection images (e.g., X-ray images) is acquired and subsequently a reconstruction of the interior is computed from the available project data. The algorithms that are used to compute such reconstructions are known as tomographic reconstruction algorithms. Discrete tomography is concerned with the tomographic reconstruction of images that are known to contain only a few different gray levels. By using this knowledge in the reconstruction algorithm it is often possible to reduce the number of projections required to compute an accurate reconstruction, compared to algorithms that do not use prior knowledge. This thesis deals with new reconstruction algorithms for discrete tomography. In particular, the first five chapters are about reconstruction algorithms based on network flow methods. These algorithms make use of an elegant correspondence between certain types of tomography problems and network flow problems from the field of Operations Research. Chapter 6 deals with a problem that occurs in the application of discrete tomography to the reconstruction of nanocrystals from projections obtained by electron microscopy.The research for this thesis has been financially supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), project 613.000.112.UBL - phd migration 201

Neural Networks for Discrete Tomography

Discrete tomography deals with the reconstruction of binary images from their projections in a small number of directions. In this paper we consider possible neural network approaches to this tomographic reconstruction problem. In particular we are interested in methods that can compute reconstructions in real-time and make efficient use of prior knowledge about the images, even when this knowledge is difficult to model by hand. We propose both a feedforward back-propagation network method and a Hopfield network method for solving the reconstruction problem.