Enhancing Tabletop X-Ray Phase Contrast Imaging with Nano-Fabrication.

X-ray phase-contrast imaging is a promising approach for improving soft-tissue contrast and lowering radiation dose in biomedical applications. While current tabletop imaging systems adapt to common x-ray tubes and large-area detectors by employing absorptive elements such as absorption gratings or monolithic crystals to filter the beam, we developed nanometric phase gratings which enable tabletop x-ray far-field interferometry with only phase-shifting elements, leading to a substantial enhancement in the performance of phase contrast imaging. In a general sense the method transfers the demands on the spatial coherence of the x-ray source and the detector resolution to the feature size of x-ray phase masks. We demonstrate its capabilities in hard x-ray imaging experiments at a fraction of clinical dose levels and present comparisons with the existing Talbot-Lau interferometer and with conventional digital radiography.

Motionless electromagnetic phase stepping versus mechanical phase stepping in x-ray phase-contrast imaging with a compact source.

X-ray phase contrast imaging based on grating interferometers detects the refractive index distribution of an object without relying on radiation attenuation, thereby having the potential for reduced radiation absorption. These techniques belong to the broader category of optical wavefront measurement, which requires stepping the phase of the interference pattern to obtain a pixel-wise map of the phase distortion of the wavefront. While phase stepping traditionally involves mechanical scanning of a grating or mirror, we developed electromagnetic phase stepping (EPS) for imaging with compact sources to obviate the need for mechanical movement. In EPS a solenoid coil is placed outside the x-ray tube to shift its focal spot with a magnetic field, causing a relative movement between the projection of the sample and the interference pattern in the image. Here we present two embodiments of this method. We verified experimentally that electromagnetic and mechanical phase stepping give the same results and attain the same signal-to-noise ratios under the same radiation dose. We found that the relative changes of interference fringe visibility were within 3.0% when the x-ray focal spot was shifted by up to 1.0 mm in either direction. We conclude that when using x-ray tube sources, EPS is an effective means of phase stepping without the need for mechanical movement.