Image restoration in chirp-pulse microwave CT (CP-MCT)

Chirp-pulse microwave computed tomography (CP-MCT) is a technique for imagi ng the distribution of temperature variations inside biological tissues. Ev en if resolution and contrast are adequate to this purpose, a further impro vement of image quality is desirable. In this paper, we discuss the blur of CP-MCT images and we propose a method for estimating the corresponding poi nt spread function (PSF), To this purpose we use both a measured and a comp uted projection of a cylindrical phantom, We find a good agreement between the two cases. Finally the estimated PSF is used for deconvolving data corr esponding to various kinds of cylindrical phantoms, We use an iterative non linear deconvolution method which assures nonnegative solutions and we demo nstrate the improvement of image quality which can be obtained in such a wa y.