System and method for determining confidence measurements of single volume elements in computer tomography

1. A method for determining confidence values for voxels, the method comprising:

a) acquiring real projections of an object in a tomography system, wherein each real projection includes a plurality of pixel values, each pixel value corresponding to a respective penetrating-wave beam; and

reconstructing an image of the object from the real projections, the image including a plurality of the voxels;

b) generating a confidence value for each of the voxels by:

computing a manifold of error measures for different penetrating-wave beams through the voxel, wherein each of the manifold of error measures is computed for one of the pixel values as a difference between the one of the pixel values and a summation of a product of a weighting factor and respective voxel values for voxels through which the respective penetrating-wave beam passes;

building a histogram from the manifold of error measures;

converting the histogram to a probability distribution; and

deriving a characteristic value from this probability distribution.

2. The method as claimed in claim 1 wherein the object is represented by volume slices.

3. The method as claimed in claim 2 wherein reconstructing the image of the object from the real projections comprises generating the volume slices from the real projections.

4. The method as claimed in claim 1 wherein the characteristic value is derived through an integration of the probability distribution within an interval.

5. The method as claimed in claim 4 wherein the confidence measure is derived from the characteristic value.

6. A computer program product embodied on a non-transitory computer readable medium having instructions stored thereon to cause a computer to perform steps of a method for determining confidence values for volume units, the method comprising:

a) acquiring real projections of an object in a tomography system, wherein each real projection includes a plurality of pixel values, each pixel value corresponding to a respective penetrating-wave beam;

b) generating a confidence measure for each of the volume units by:

computing a manifold of error measures for different penetrating-wave beams through the voxel, wherein each of the manifold of error measures is computed for one of the pixel values as a difference between the one of the pixel values and a summation of a product of a weighting factor and respective voxel values for voxels through which the respective penetrating-wave beam passes;

building a histogram from the manifold of error measures;

converting the histogram to a probability distribution; and

deriving a characteristic value from this probability distribution.

7. A system for determining confidence values for volume units, the system comprising:

a wave source;

an object configured to receive waves from the wave source;

an image detector configured to record attenuated waves that generate real projections from the object;

a computing system coupled to the wave source and the image detector;

a wave controller coupled to the wave source and to the computing system;

a manipulation controller coupled to the object and to the computing system; and

a data acquisition module coupled to the image detector and to the computing system;

wherein the computing system is configured to:

acquire the real projections from the image detector; and

generate a confidence measure for each of the volume units by:

computing a manifold of error measures for different penetrating-wave beams through the voxel, wherein each of the manifold of error measures is computed for one of the pixel values as a difference between the one of the pixel values and a summation of a product of a weighting factor and respective voxel values for voxels through which the respective penetrating-wave beam passes;

building a histogram from the manifold of error measures;

converting the histogram to a probability distribution; and

deriving a characteristic value from this probability distribution.