Very High Contrast and Very High Spatial Resolution 2-D, 2.5-D and 3-D Breast Tissue Visualization under X-ray Dark Field Imaging

A parallel x-ray beam that is made by an asymmetric-cut Bragg monochromator-collimator (MC) is incident on breast tissue so that the beam containing information from the breast tissue is incident upon a Laue-case angle analyzer (LAA). This beam is subsequently split into a forward diffracted beam and a separate diffracted beam. We acquire two beams simultaneously each of which contains relating angular information on specimen so that one can deduce simultaneously angular information at each pixel. In this paper, we propose an imaging system using dark-field imaging (XDFI) for 2D image, CT measurement and 2.5D image (tomosynthesis) based on a tandem system of Bragg- and Laue-case crystals with two CCD cameras, along with a data-processing method to extract information on refraction from the measured entangled intensities by use of rocking curve fitting with polynomial functions. Reconstructed images of soft tissues are presented and described.

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