The Evolution of Tomographic Sensors

Tomography entered the public imagination as a "scanner" i.e., a machine that takes a picture of the inner body. In engineering terms, however, tomography is better understood as a family of tomographic sensors: distributed sensors arranged so that their measurements, once processed and fused, become spatial information of an object that no single sensor element can provide on its own. Tomography has repeatedly reinvented itself when moving from medical to industrial applications: the foundations may stay familiar, but the sensor constraints such as speed, geometry, robustness, and computation change drastically.