Abstract
Conventional x-ray radiography is a well-established standard in diagnostic imaging of human bones. It reveals typical bony anatomy with a strong surrounding cortical bone and trabecular structure of the inner part. However, due to limited spatial resolution, x-ray radiography cannot provide information on the microstructure of the trabecular bone. Thus, microfractures without dislocation are often missed in initial radiographs, resulting in a lack or delay of adequate therapy. Here we show that x-ray vector radiography (XVR) can overcome this limitation and allows for a deeper insight into the microstructure with a radiation exposure comparable to standard radiography. XVR senses x-ray ultrasmall-angle scattering in addition to the attenuation contrast and thereby reveals the mean scattering strength, its degree of anisotropy and the orientation of scattering structures. Corresponding to the structural characteristics of bones, there is a homogenous mean scattering signal of the trabecular bone but the degree of anisotropy is strongly affected by variations in the trabecular structure providing more detailed information on the bone microstructure. The measurements were performed at the Munich Compact Light Source, a novel type of x-ray source based on inverse Compton scattering. This laboratory-sized source produces highly brilliant quasi-monochromatic x-rays with a tunable energy.
Highlights
Conventional x-ray radiography is a standard diagnostic technique in clinical trauma imaging, providing a high diagnostic accuracy for fractures of the cancellous bones of the extremities
Single DFC images, are only sensitive to one specific scattering direction and could potentially miss information. Exploiting this directional dependence, Jensen et al proposed the method of x-ray vector radiography (XVR)[13,14]
We present an XVR of an ex-vivo human hand and thereby show the potential of this measurement technique in detecting clinically occult fractures, in particular when the anisotropy image is assessed for the diagnosis
Summary
Conventional x-ray radiography is a standard diagnostic technique in clinical trauma imaging, providing a high diagnostic accuracy for fractures of the cancellous bones of the extremities. In Germany, 1.7 x-ray investigations per person and year are made[1], but it is estimated that in such radiographs about 3.7% of all fractures in the extremities might be missed. One recently developed method that could improve radiography in the first place is grating-based x-ray darkfield-contrast (DFC) imaging, which is related to the ultrasmall-angle scattering properties of the specimen[7,8,9,10]. Single DFC images, are only sensitive to one specific scattering direction and could potentially miss information Exploiting this directional dependence, Jensen et al proposed the method of x-ray vector radiography (XVR)[13,14]. It combines several DFC-images with different sample orientations around the optical axis to a multi-contrast image. We present an XVR of an ex-vivo human hand and thereby show the potential of this measurement technique in detecting clinically occult fractures, in particular when the anisotropy image is assessed for the diagnosis
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