Optimizing contrast and spatial resolution in hard X-ray tomography of medically relevant tissues

Abstract

Hard X-ray tomography with Paganin's widespread single-distance phase retrieval filter improves contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) while reducing spatial resolution (SR). We demonstrate that a Gaussian filter provided larger CNR at high SR with interpretable density measurements for two medically relevant soft tissue samples. Paganin's filter produced larger CNR at low SR, though \emph{a priori} assumptions were generally false and image quality gains diminish for CNR $>1$. Therefore, simple absorption measurements of low-$Z$ specimens combined with Gaussian filtering can provide improved image quality and model-independent density measurements compared to single-distance phase retrieval.

This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 116, 023702 (2020), and may be found at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5133742

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