Preliminary feasibility study of an in-line phase contrast X-ray imaging prototype

In this study, a series of imaging experiments on biological specimens, including human breast core biopsies, lumpectomy, and chicken tissues, as well as standard phantoms, were performed in an effort to investigate the feasibility of an in-line phase contrast X-ray imaging prototype. The prototype system employed in the study consists of a microfocus X-ray source with tungsten target and a digital flat panel detector, and it can be operated in both conventional attenuation-based imaging mode and in-line phase contrast imaging mode. Biological specimens were imaged in the conventional mode and phase contrast mode with the same source-to-image-detector distance (SID), and phase contrast images exhibited both improved image quality compared with conventional images, and the overshooting patterns along the boundaries in the specimens, which revealed the occurrence of the edge enhancement effect provided by the phase contrast technique. In addition, the performance of the phase contrast mode and conventional mode was compared based on the American College of Radiology (ACR) phantom imaging and contrast detail mammography (CDMAM) phantom-based contrast detail analysis with two experimental settings: one with the same SID and the other with the same object entrance exposure. In both pairs of comparison under our experimental conditions, the phase contrast imaging mode exhibited improved image quality as compared to the conventional mode, which further supported the feasibility of the prototype.