Patent ID: 7801587

Claim:
A system for synthesizing an image slice of a selected object from multiple projected object images created by irradiating the object with a source of radiation, comprising: a. a fiducial reference located at a fixed position relative to the selected object to provide constraint for a number of degrees of freedom correlated to a number of degrees of freedom of the system, the fiducial reference comprising at least a first and a second identifiable reference marker disposed in a fixed position relative to one another; b. a recording medium for recording projected images of the fiducial reference and a region of interest of the selected object; and c. an image synthesizer configured to the compute an effective radiographic diameter of the image of the first reference marker in the projected images and to compute the relative magnification among the projected images based on the effective radiographic diameter, the synthesizer configured to reconstruct a tomographic slice from the object images scaled to the same relative magnification; wherein the fiducial reference, the source of radiation, and the recording medium are configured to be arbitrarily movable relative to one another during the recording of the projected images.