Towards solving the bent-ray tomographic problem

A new computerized method is described for reconstruction of a refractive index distribution from time-of-flight measurements of radiation/waves passing through the distribution and taken on a known boundary surrounding it. The reconstruction method is a bent-ray computed tomography (CT) approach based on a novel ray description which does not require the ray paths to be known. This allows the refractive index to be found by iterative solution of linear equations, rather than through the computationally intensive procedure of ray tracing, which normally accompanies iterative solutions to problems of this type. Preliminary results show that this method is capable of handling appreciable spatial refractive index variations in large bodies.