The degradation function in conventional tomography

A method is developed by which the imaging characteristics of a tomographic x-ray unit may be determined directly from a study of the mechanical motion of the unit. In this method we first describe the mechanical motions in terms of a vector equation. From this vector equation, a "degradation function" is derived which acts as a multiplicative factor, directly relating the optical transfer function of the system in a tomographic mode to the optimal transfer function of the system in a stationary mode. Therefore, if the imaging properties of the system in the stationary mode are known (or, as is often the case, can be neglected), it is a simple matter to determine the imaging properties in the tomographic mode. The star pattern is used to verify the validity of this method.