Revisit to the Inverse Exponential Radon Transform

Abstract: This revisit gives a survey on the analytical methods for the inverse exponential Radon transform which has been investigated in the past three decades from both mathematical interests and medical applications such as nuclear medicine emission imaging. The derivation of the classical inversion formula is through the recent argument developed for the inverse attenuated Radon transform. That derivation allows the exponential parameter to be a complex constant, which is useful to other applications such as magnetic resonance imaging and tensor field imaging. The survey also includes the new technique of using the finite Hilbert transform to handle the exact reconstruction from 180 degree data. Special treatment has been paid on two practically important subjects. One is the exact reconstruction from partial measurements such as half-scan and truncated-scan data, and the other is the reconstruction from diverging-beam data. The noise propagation in the reconstruction is touched upon with more heuristic discussions than mathematical inference. The numerical realizations of several classical reconstruction algorithms are included. In the conclusion, several topics are discussed for more investigations in the future.