Digital tomosynthesis in cone-beam geometry for industrial applications: Feasibility and preliminary study

We introduce a cone-beam computed tomography with insufficient projections obtained from a limited-angle scan, the socalled digital tomosynthesis, and demonstrate its feasibility for the industrial applications by implementing to the reconstruction of internal slice images of a multilayer printed circuit board. The image reconstruction algorithm is based on the filtered-backprojection approach for the cone-beam geometry with isocentric linear motion in the scanning trajectory of the X-ray source and imaging detector pair. Although the slice image reconstructed at the plane of interest was affected by the structures outside, we could reconstruct the plane of interest with the total scan angle less than 20 degrees and 11 projections. The digital tomosynthesis is expected to be practical for industrial tomography restricted to the limited-angle scan.