Dark-field signal extraction in propagation-based phase-contrast imaging

Abstract

A method for extracting the dark-field signal in propagation-based phase-contrast imaging is proposed. In the case of objects consisting predominantly of a single material, or several different materials with similar ratios of the real decrement to the imaginary part of the complex refractive index, the proposed method requires a single image for extraction of the dark-field signal in two-dimensional projection imaging. In the case of three-dimensional tomographic imaging, the method needs only one image to be collected at each projection angle. A preliminary example demonstrates that this method can improve the visualization of microcalcifications in propagation-based X-ray breast cancer imaging. It is suggested that the proposed approach may be useful in other forms of biomedical imaging, where it can help one to obtain additional small-angle scattering information without increasing the radiation dose to the sample.

References in corpus (1)

• X-ray Fokker--Planck equation for paraxial imaging

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Quantifying the x-ray dark-field signal in single-grid imaging
• Single-exposure x-ray dark-field imaging: quantifying sample microstructure using a single-grid setup
• Paraxial diffusion-field retrieval
• X-ray dark-field via spectral propagation-based imaging
• Low-exposure, high-quality multimodal speckle X-ray imaging via an intrinsic gradient-flow approach