3D X-ray multislice ptychographic tomography with sparse angular measurements

This proposal aims at developing an advanced 3D X-ray ptychographic imaging technique that can achieve volumetric imaging with high spatial resolution and fast data acquisition. Ptychography can be extended to 3D imaging in two ways: multi-slice ptychography or ptychographic tomography. Ptychographic tomography relies on 2D ptychography to supply projections to conventional tomographic algorithms, whilst multi-slice ptychography uses the redundancy in ptychographic data to split the reconstruction into a series of axial slices. Whilst multi-slice ptychography can handle thick specimens and has a much smaller data requirement than ptychographic tomography, its depth resolution is relatively poor. Here we propose an imaging modality that combines the benefits of the two approaches, enabling isotropic 3D resolution imaging with a smaller number of angular measurements than theoretically required by 4-5 times.