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

• DOI: 10.1038/srep13581
• Publication Date: 2015-08-28T09:40:38Z
• Authors: Houxun Miao; Andrew A. Gomella; Katherine J. Harmon; Eric E. Bennett; Nicholas Chedid; Sami Znati; Alireza Panna; Barbara A. Foster; Priya Bhandarkar; Han Wen
• Keywords: 02 engineering and technology; 0210 nano-technology; Article

AbstractX-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.