On the relationship between intensity diffraction tomography and phase-contrast tomography

Diffraction tomography (DT) is a well-known method for reconstructing the complex-valued refractive index distribution of weakly scattering objects. A reconstruction theory of intensity DT (I-DT) has been proposed [Gbur and Volf, JOSA A 2002] that can accomplish such a reconstruction from knowledge of only the wavefield intensities on two different transverse planes at each tomographic view angle. In this work, we elucidate the relationship between I-DT and phase-contrast tomography and demonstrate that I-DT reconstruction theory contains some of the existing reconstruction algorithms for phase-contrast tomography as special cases.