Information Theory: An X-ray Microscopy Perspective

TL;DR

This paper applies information theory to analyze and optimize the X-ray microscopy workflow, quantifying how various processing steps affect data fidelity and proposing mutual information as a universal quality indicator.

Contribution

It introduces an information-theoretic framework to evaluate and optimize XRM processes, providing a quantitative basis for protocol comparison and improvement.

Findings

Mutual information effectively indicates reconstruction fidelity.

Different workflow stages redistribute information, creating bottlenecks.

The framework supports protocol optimization under constraints.

Abstract

X-ray microscopy (XRM) is commonly used to obtain three-dimensional information on internal microstructure, but the imaging pipeline introduces noise, redundancy and information loss at multiple stages. This paper treats the XRM workflow as an information-processing system acting on a finite information budget. Using entropy, mutual information and Kullback-Leibler divergence, we quantify how acquisition, denoising, alignment, sparse-angle sampling, dose variation and reconstruction reshape the statistical structure of projection data and reconstructed volumes. Case studies based on the Walnut 1 dataset illustrate how these processes redistribute information and impose bottlenecks. We summarise the workflow using a unified information budget and show that mutual information provides a reconstruction-agnostic indicator of fidelity, supporting quantitative comparison and optimisation of XRM protocols, particularly under low-dose or time-constrained conditions