A computed tomography (CT) system includes a rotatable gantry having an opening to receive an object to be scanned, an x-ray tube, a pixelated detector positioned on the rotatable gantry to receive the x-rays from the x-ray tube, and a computer programmed to acquire helical CT data, determine a sunrise (SR) view position for each pixel within a SR index image, and determine a sunset (SS) view position for each pixel within a SS index image, for a given reference image slice, wherein the SR view position is a first angle of an illumination range for a voxel and the SS view position is a last angle of the illumination range for the voxel, for all slices, rotate the SR index image and the SS index image through a projection index, and reconstruct an image based on the rotated SR index image and the SS index image.
