Experimental comparison of grating- and propagation-based hard X-ray phase tomography of soft tissue

Journal Article · Tue Oct 21 00:00:00 EDT 2014 · Journal of Applied Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4897225· OSTI ID:22305852

Lang, S.; Schulz, G.; Müller, B. ^[1]; Dominietto, M. ^[1]; Langer, M. ^[2]; Rack, A.; Le Duc, G. ^[2]; David, C. ^[3]; Mohr, J. ^[4]; Pfeiffer, F. ^[5]; Weitkamp, T. ^[2]; Synchrotron Soleil, Gif-sur-Yvette ^[6]

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1. Biomaterials Science Center, University of Basel, Basel (Switzerland)
2. European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble (France)
3. Laboratory for Micro- and Nanotechnology, Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen (Switzerland)
4. Institute of Microstructure Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen (Germany)
5. Physik-Department und Institut für Medizintechnik, Technische Universität München, Garching (Germany)
6. France

When imaging soft tissues with hard X-rays, phase contrast is often preferred over conventional attenuation contrast due its superior sensitivity. However, it is unclear which of the numerous phase tomography methods yields the optimized results at given experimental conditions. Therefore, we quantitatively compared the three phase tomography methods implemented at the beamline ID19 of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility: X-ray grating interferometry (XGI), and propagation-based phase tomography, i.e., single-distance phase retrieval (SDPR) and holotomography (HT), using cancerous tissue from a mouse model and an entire heart of a rat. We show that for both specimens, the spatial resolution derived from the characteristic morphological features is about a factor of two better for HT and SDPR compared to XGI, whereas the XGI data generally exhibit much better contrast-to-noise ratios for the anatomical features. Moreover, XGI excels in fidelity of the density measurements, and is also more robust against low-frequency artifacts than HT, but it might suffer from phase-wrapping artifacts. Thus, we can regard the three phase tomography methods discussed as complementary. The application will decide which spatial and density resolutions are desired, for the imaging task and dose requirements, and, in addition, the applicant must choose between the complexity of the experimental setup and the one of data processing.

• OSTI ID: 22305852
• Journal Information: Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 116, Issue 15; Other Information: (c) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-8979
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY
ANIMAL TISSUES
ATTENUATION
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
DATA PROCESSING
EUROPEAN SYNCHROTRON RADIATION FACILITY
HARD X RADIATION
INTERFEROMETRY
NOISE
PLANT TISSUES
RADIATION DOSES
SENSITIVITY
SPATIAL RESOLUTION
TOMOGRAPHY