Development and evaluation of minimal-scan reconstruction algorithms for diffraction tomography

Diffraction tomography (DT) is a tomographic inversion technique that reconstructs the spatially variant refractive index distribution of a scattering object, and it can be viewed as a generalization of conventional X-ray computed tomography (CT) where X-rays have been replaced with a diffracting acoustical or electromagnetic wavefield. It is widely believed that measurements from a full angular range of 2(pi) are generally required to exactly reconstruct a complex-valued refractive index distribution. However, we have recently revealed that one needs measurements only over the angular range zero to 270 degrees to perform an exact reconstruction, and we developed minimal-scan filtered backpropagation (MS-FBPP) algorithms to achieve this. In this work, we review and numerically implement a recently developed family of minimal-scan reconstruction algorithms for DT that effectively operate by transforming the minimal-scan DT reconstruction problem into a conventional full-scan X-ray CT reconstruction problem.