Numerical evaluation of methods for computing tomographic projections

Methods for computing forward/back projections of 2D images can be viewed as numerical integration techniques. The accuracy of any ray-driven projection method can be improved by increasing the number of ray-paths that are traced per projection bin. The accuracy of pixel-driven projection methods can be increased by dividing each pixel into a number of smaller sub-pixels and projecting each sub-pixel. The authors compare 4 competing methods of computing forward/back projections: bilinear interpolation, ray-tracing, pixel-driven projection based upon sub-pixels, and pixel-driven projection based upon circular, rather than square, pixels. This latter method is equivalent to a fast, bi-nonlinear interpolation. These methods and the choice of the number of ray-paths per projection bin or the number of sub-pixels per pixel present a trade-off between computational speed and accuracy. To solve the problem of assessing backprojection accuracy, the analytical inverse Fourier transform of the ramp filtered forward projection of the Shepp and Logan head phantom is derived