A box spline calculus for computed tomography

B-splines are attractive basis functions for the continuous-domain representation of biomedical images and volumes. In this paper, we prove that the extended family of box splines are closed under the Radon transform and derive explicit formulae for their transforms. Our results are general; they cover all known brands of compactly-supported box splines (tensor-product B-splines, separable or not) in any dimensions. In particular, we prove that the 2-D Radon transform of an N-direction box spline is generally a (non-uniform) polynomial spline of degree N-1. The proposed framework allows for a proper discretization of a variety of 2-D and 3-D tomographic reconstruction problems in a box spline basis. It is of relevance for imaging modalities such as X-ray computed tomography and 3-D cryo-electron microscopy.