Fluorescent computer tomography: a model for correction of X-ray absorption

The distributions of individual trace elements within a sample can be found using fluorescent computed tomography (FCT). The absorption of incident and fluorescent X-rays results in degraded reconstructions of the distributions. The proposed method uses the absorption density, measured using conventional absorption tomography, to remove absorption effects. A model for FCT with absorption is developed and simulated. The resulting corrected reconstructions are compared to the reconstructions degraded by attenuation efforts. A comparison is made with other methods which utilize knowledge of the sample composition and a standard source to estimate the absorption coefficients used to correct for attenuation effects