Computed tomography simulation with superquadrics

Accurate and efficient simulation of an x-ray transform for representative structures plays an important role in research and development of x-ray CT, for the evaluation and improvement of CT image reconstruction algorithms, in particular. Superquadrics are a family of three-dimensional objects, which can be used to model a variety of anatomical structures. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for the computation of x-ray transforms for superellipsoids and tori with a monochromatic x-ray. Their usefulness is demonstrated by projection and reconstruction of a superquadric-based thorax phantom. Our work indicates that superquadric modeling provides a more realistic visualization than quadratic modeling, and a faster computation than spline methods. (c) 2005 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.