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Introduction

The development of MuhRec started when there was a need to support a reconstruction mode that was not available in our usual reconstruction software. A that time I was newly coming to the field of neutron imaging from a position as algorithm developer at Varian medical systems. Using some skills I acquired at Varian, I took up an old reconstructor project I started as post doc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Over the year this first prototype has been several times heavliy revised to provide GUI and the flexible module system that makes it possible to easily add new processing features.

Main features

MuhRec is a reconstructor software for computed tomography. It currently reconstructs projection data from parallel beam tomography acquisitions. The software includes the following features:

• Two modes of operation; GUI and command-line.
• A GUI to help the user to set up the reconstruction and execute the processing.
• An efficient back-projection algorithm.
• It provides artifact cleaning algorithms to remove ring and line artifacts.
• A guide to find center of rotation and tightest margins.
• Acquisition axis tilt correction.
• Handles image formats common at neutron imaging beamlines (tiff and fits).
• Various options for normalization.

MuhRec3 is the next step of our reconstruction tool development. It provides more flexibility in terms of configuration. The user can configure the order in which the preprocessing modules are executed. The design of the reconstruction engine provides an open API that makes it possible for users to add their own processing and back projection modules. Due to major changes in the architecture of the software it has not been possible to maintain backwards compatibility with the configuration files from earlier versions of MuhRec.

Some words about the name

The name MuhRec is derived from the sound of the cow (in German 'Muh') and Reconstructor. There are two reasons for the Muh. Firstly, the author lives in the Swiss village Muhen (which by the way has nothing to do with cows). The software was to large extent developed on the train commuting between Muhen and Paul Scherrer Institut. The development distance can hence be determined to be about 20000~km. The second reason is that the cow is the national proudness of Switzerland... and the cow says 'Muh'. The third reason is that there are many cows surrounding PSI.

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