Restoration of fine azimuthal sampling of measured TOF projection data

TOF acquisition results in additional data dimensions that significantly increase data size. Due to the redundancy of TOF information, data can be compressed almost without loss of resolution. Such compression may consist of azimuthal mashing by a hardware rebinner. In addition to this, some azimuthal and radial information might not be acquired at all due to scanner design. Gaps that exist between the detector blocks are one example of this. TOF iterative and some TOF analytical reconstruction can handle significantly azimuthally undersampled data. Nevertheless, widely used analytical non-TOF reconstruction algorithms, such as FORE+FBP, need fine azimuthal sampling of projection data, as well as TOF FORE. We propose to restore fine azimuthal sampling of measured data for scanner performance assessments exploiting TOF consistency conditions. A practical application is a preprocessing of data for standard scanner characteristics assessment. Point source resolution estimation by analytical non-TOF methods is considered in this paper.