Phase-contrast x-ray imaging with a liquid-metal-jet-anode microfocus source

A study on new approaches in coherent x-ray microscopy of biological specimens

“…Kirkpatrick-Baez (KB) mirrors [8] are used to provide the illumination for effective near field propagation-based imaging. In the laboratory high-power conventional solid anode [152] as well as liquid jet anode sources [145] can be used for the same application. A key requirement here is a small source size, to provide (i) a nearly point source and (ii) high enough spatial coherence at the sample.…”

“…As shown above, the illumination in plane z = ∆z, however, is equal to that in z = ∆z, apart from a global phase factor. For notational convenience we define 145) so that the object transmission function reads…”

Phase contrast tomography of the mouse cochlea at microfocus x-ray sources

“…16 Compared to absorption imaging, inline phase contrast enables increased spatial resolution, along with higher contrast for low absorbing features due to edgeenhancement. 8,9,23,24 However, tomographic reconstruction of phase contrast projection images results in disturbing edge-artifacts in the 3D data, inhibiting automatic segmentation. To overcome this limitation, we apply a phase retrieval algorithm which removes those artifacts and improves the signal-to-noise ratio.…”

Tomography of human trabecular bone with a laser-wakefield driven x-ray source

“…The simplest path to improved reconstruction quality then is acquiring as many projections as possible, though of course this comes at the expense of increased dose and scan time. As the source here is pulsed the exposure time for each projection is effectively zero, and so the limiting factor on the total scan time is the repetition In figure 6 the average brightness of the laser source is plotted in the brightness-source size plane, both for the current experiment and for a variety of microfocus sources, adapted from [40,41]. The solid line represents the simulated upper limit of a tungsten anode microfocus tube, using measured anode melting points [42] and simulated spectra [43].…”