Trimodal low-dose X-ray tomography

Abstract

X-ray grating interferometry is a coherent imaging technique that bears tremendous potential for three-dimensional tomographic imaging of soft biological tissue and other specimens whose details exhibit very weak absorption contrast. It is intrinsically trimodal, delivering phase contrast, absorption contrast, and scattering (“dark-field”) contrast. Recently reported acquisition strategies for grating-interferometric phase tomography constitute a major improvement of dose efficiency and speed. In particular, some of these techniques eliminate the need for scanning of one of the gratings (“phase stepping”). This advantage, however, comes at the cost of other limitations. These can be a loss in spatial resolution, or the inability to fully separate the three imaging modalities. In the present paper we report a data acquisition and processing method that optimizes dose efficiency but does not share the main limitations of other recently reported methods. Although our method still relies on phase stepping, it effectively uses only down to a single detector frame per projection angle and yields images corresponding to all three contrast modalities. In particular, this means that dark-field imaging remains accessible. The method is also compliant with data acquisition over an angular range of only 180° and with a continuous rotation of the specimen.

Quantitative and dynamic measurements of biological fresh samples with X-ray phase contrast tomography

“…In this case it is important to complete the phasestepping procedure quickly in order to achieve a highthroughput measurement. Efficient scanning methods for the phase stepping such as an interlaced method have been proposed (Zanette et al, 2011(Zanette et al, , 2012. In the present study a high-throughput system using the phase-stepping method was developed to measure a fresh sample.…”

Simulations of multi-contrast x-ray imaging using near-field speckles

“…They excel in visualising very small density differences, such as similar types of soft tissues, and in detecting unresolvable features causing a relevant small angle x-ray scattering signal, such as fibres or cracks [1]. For these reasons they have important applications especially in the biomedical field and in materials science.…”

Multi-modal hard x-ray imaging with a laboratory source using selective reflection from a mirror

“…The wealth of information originating from multi-modal imaging can be a significant tool in bio-medical research [13][14][15]. Importantly, an increasing number of studies focus on the use of phase and scattering contrast with x-ray laboratory sources (see for instance [9,12,[16][17][18]).…”