Abstract

Phase-contrast imaging with x-rays is a developing field for imaging weakly absorbing materials. In this work, two phase-contrast imaging methods, grating- and speckle-based imaging, that measure the derivative of the phase shift, have been implemented with a laboratory source and compared experimentally. It was found that for the same dose conditions, the speckle-tracking differential phase-contrast images have considerably higher contrast-to-noise ratio than the grating-based images, but at the cost of lower resolution. Grating-based imaging performs better in terms of resolution, but would require longer exposure times, mainly due to absorption in the grating interferometer.

Highlights

  • To overcome the limitations of low resolution and poor contrast when imaging weakly absorbing objects with x-rays, different phase-sensitive imaging techniques are being developed

  • Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd interferometer used in grating-based imaging (GBI) was designed with grating periods p1 = 4.08 μm of the π-shifting phase grating G1 and p2 = 2.4 μm of the absorption grating G2

  • For a plastic wedge with a small angle, a LEGO R sword (Fig. 2), the contrast-to-noise ratios (CNR) of the Differential phase contrast (DPC) images were evaluated as CNR = |IA − IB|/σ

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Summary

Introduction

To overcome the limitations of low resolution and poor contrast when imaging weakly absorbing objects with x-rays, different phase-sensitive imaging techniques are being developed. The well-established propagation-based imaging method (PBI) measures the second-order derivative of the phase, while grating-based imaging (GBI) [1] and the relatively new speckle-based imaging (SBI) [2, 3] measure the refraction angle. By tracking the shift of a known intensity pattern, a map of the refraction angle, which is proportional to the derivative of the phase shift, can be constructed. GBI and SBI use a Talbot pattern [4] and a near-field speckle pattern, respectively. These two methods have been implemented with a laboratory micro-focus x-ray source, and have been used to image different samples under the same dose conditions, with the goal of comparing the quality of the obtained images

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