Development of an emulator for tomographic images generated by radiation transmission

Abstract

A computer program to emulate tomographic images generated by radiation transmission has been developed. The algorithm uses a deterministic approach, to generate the projections which are the supplied to an existing image reconstruction software. A dispersion related to the counting statistics, is also incorporated to the algorithm to simulate the influence of the detector efficiency and counting time on the quality of the final image. The detector resolution is as well included in the algorithm, by assuming a Gaussian shape for its line spread function – LSF. The program deals with cylindrical samples containing any desired number of cylindrical rods inside them, requiring their positions, dimensions and attenuation properties as input data. Some images taken with a thermal neutron tomograph equipped with a position sensitive detector have been compared with those emulated by the developed program