Stability and locality of amplitude and phase contrast tomographies

Abstract

We perform a theoretical analysis of the mathematical stability and locality of several modes of amplitude and phase contrast computed tomography (CT) suitable for reconstruction of the 3D distribution of complex refractive index in samples displaying weak absorption contrast. We present a general formalism for CT reconstruction in linear shiftinvariant optical systems. Examples of such systems include propagation-based and analyser-based CT. We obtain general formulae for CT reconstruction from analyser-based projection data. We also propose a new tomographic algorithm for the reconstruction of the 3D distribution of complex refractive index in a sample from a single propagation-based proje..