Modified Phillips–Tikhonov regularization for plasma tomography

The tomography has been used as a powerful diagnostic method for visualizing cross-sectional images in plasma research. Without any biasing data, the Phillips–Tikhonov (P–T) regularization method was attempted in this work to reconstruct cross-sectional phantom images of the plasma by minimizing the gradient between adjacent pixel data. A comparison of the tomographic reconstructions of the cross-sectional images similar to the tokamak plasmas by the P–T method and the maximum entropy (ME) method showed that the P–T method produced more accurate results. In addition, the P–T method was modified by adding an iteration procedure with a second-order correction to improve the accuracy of the reconstruction for noisy line-integrated data. Tomographic reconstructions in the presence of Gaussian-distributed random noise demonstrated that the modified P–T method with only several iterations significantly reduced the mean reconstruction error by (30–50)% of the original root-mean-square error caused by the random noise.