Imaging is omnipresent in modern society with imaging devices based on a zoo of physical principles, probing a specimen across different wavelengths, energies and time. Recent years have seen a change in the imaging landscape with more and more imaging devices combining that which previously was used separately. Motivated by these hardware developments, an ever increasing set of mathematical ideas is appearing regarding how data from different imaging modalities or channels can be synergistically combined in the image reconstruction process, exploiting structural and/or functional correlations between the multiple images. Here we review these developments, give pointers to important challenges and provide an outlook as to how the field may develop in the forthcoming years.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synergistic tomographic image reconstruction: part 1’.

成像在现代社会中无处不在，其成像设备基于一系列物理原理，可在不同波长、能量和时间范围内探测样本。近年来，随着越来越多的成像设备结合以前单独使用的设备，成像领域发生了变化。在这些硬件发展的推动下，关于如何在图像重建过程中协同组合来自不同成像模式或通道的数据，利用多个图像之间的结构和/或功能相关性，出现了越来越多的数学思想。在这里，我们回顾了这些发展，指出了重要的挑战，并展望了该领域在未来几年的发展前景。

本文是主题问题“协同断层扫描图像重建：第 1 部分”的一部分。