Segmentation of tomographic data without image reconstruction

Geometric tomography (GT), a technique for processing tomographic projections in order to reconstruct the external and internal boundaries of objects, is presented. GT does not necessitate the reconstruction of an image of the slice of the object. It is shown that the segmentation can be performed directly with the raw data, the sinogram produced with the scanner, and that those segmented shapes can be geometrically transformed into reconstructed shapes in the usual space. If one is interested in only the boundaries of the objects, they do not need to reconstruct an image, and therefore the method needs much less computation than those using traditional computed tomography techniques. Experimental results are presented for both synthesized and real data, leading to subpixel positioning of the reconstructed boundaries. GT gives its best results for sparse, highly contrasted objects such as bones or blood vessels in angiograms, it allows 'on the fly' processing of the data, and real time tracking of the object boundaries. >