Abstract
X-ray phase contrast imaging (XPCI) is an innovative imaging technique which extends the contrast capabilities of ‘conventional’ absorption based x-ray systems. However, so far all XPCI implementations have suffered from one or more of the following limitations: low x-ray energies, small field of view (FOV) and long acquisition times. Those limitations relegated XPCI to a ‘research-only’ technique with an uncertain future in terms of large scale, high impact applications. We recently succeeded in designing, realizing and testing an XPCI system, which achieves significant steps toward simultaneously overcoming these limitations. Our system combines, for the first time, large FOV, high energy and fast scanning. Importantly, it is capable of providing high image quality at low x-ray doses, compatible with or even below those currently used in medical imaging. This extends the use of XPCI to areas which were unpractical or even inaccessible to previous XPCI solutions. We expect this will enable a long overdue translation into application fields such as security screening, industrial inspections and large FOV medical radiography – all with the inherent advantages of the XPCI multimodality.
Highlights
X-ray imaging is one of the most widespread inspection/diagnostic techniques, mainly because of its simplicity and low cost
X-ray phase contrast imaging (XPCI) systems based on conventional x-ray sources require 2 or 3 micro fabricated optical elements (OEs) between the source and the detector, which limit the field of view (FOV) to about 5 × 5 cm[2]
In an example for non-destructive testing, XPCI was run using a tungsten source at 50 kVp23, one of the highest energies used to pursue a real application rather than for mere demonstration purposes. These low energies are normally chosen as a consequence of the poor performance of the OEs used in XPCI at high energies (e.g. the pre-sample and the detector masks in Edge-Illumination (EI) and the source and detector grating G0/G2 in Grating Interferometry (GI))
Summary
X-ray imaging is one of the most widespread inspection/diagnostic techniques, mainly because of its simplicity and low cost. In an example for non-destructive testing, XPCI was run using a tungsten source at 50 kVp23, one of the highest energies used to pursue a real application rather than for mere demonstration purposes These low energies are normally chosen as a consequence of the poor performance of the OEs used in XPCI at high energies (e.g. the pre-sample and the detector masks in Edge-Illumination (EI) and the source and detector grating G0/G2 in Grating Interferometry (GI)). An alternative approach consists in removing the need for precise OEs and retrieving the phase information by using setups based on high magnification, as shown by Wang et al.[29] They performed XPCI at 160 kVp using a steel wool as the OE, over a FOV of 5 × 4 cm[2]; this requires either a synchrotron or a microfocal source. Access to higher energies on a large FOV through fast scans would open the way to the use of XPCI in in vivo medical applications on human patients
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