Optical Tomography

The number of applications using optical tomography has significantly increased over the past decade. A literature research providing this term as keyword gives 26 hits for 1990, 719 for 2000, and 9,202 for 2010. With an increasing number of applications, the number of different imaging modalities is also increasing. This review summarizes recent developments in tomographic methods for scattering and nonscattering samples. These two different cases of optical tomography are typically represented by biomedical imaging and atmospheric tomography, representing high- and low-scattering samples, respectively. An essential prerequisite for tomographic analyses is an understanding of light propagation in different media, which allows for the development of specific reconstruction algorithms for the different tomographic tasks.