COMPUTERIZED METHOD FOR CONVERTING POLAR TOMOGRAPHIC DATA TO A CARTESIAN IMAGE FORMAT

Tomographic data acquired in a polar reference frame is rapidly converted into data arranged in a Cartesian system suitable for processing and/or display by a program that may operate efficiently on an electronic computer. The program identifies each polar voxel, defining the region of the polar data, to one or more Cartesian voxels that overlap with it. Truncation techniques developed for use with computer graphics are used to determine an area of overlap between the voxels. Areas of overlap are indexed in a conversion table which may be used for rapid conversion between data acquired under these two coordinate systems.