Simultaneous recovery of attenuation and source density in SPECT (Q6042375)

The identification problem of Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) in two dimensions seeks to recover both attenuation \(a\) and radiation source density \(f\) in the attenuated Radon transform. This is not possible in general, but it is shown here that it is possible if \(a\) is piecewise constant and \(f\) piecewise \(C^2\) over domains with real analytic boundaries possibly having corners, plus a certain non-cancellation condition. Numerical examples show that unique reconstruction of \(a\) and \(f\) may still be possible even if the non-cancellation condition fails.