Comparison of propagation- and grating-based x-ray phase-contrast imaging techniques with a liquid-metal-jet source

X-ray phase-contrast imaging has been developed as an alternative to conventional absorption imaging, partly for its dose advantage over absorption imaging at high resolution. Grating-based imaging (GBI) and propagation-based imaging (PBI) are two phase-contrast techniques used with polychromatic laboratory sources. We compare the two methods by experiments and simulations with respect to required dose. A simulation method based on the projection approximation is designed and verified with experiments. A comparison based on simulations of the doses required for detection of an object with respect to its diameter is presented, showing that for monochromatic radiation, there is a dose advantage for PBI for small features but an advantage for GBI at larger features. However, GBI suffers more from the introduction of polychromatic radiation, in this case so much that PBI gives lower dose for all investigated feature sizes. Furthermore, we present and compare experimental images of biomedical samples. While those support the dose advantage of PBI, they also highlight the GBI advantage of quantitative reconstruction of multimaterial samples. For all experiments a liquid-metal-jet source was used. Liquid-metal-jet sources are a promising option for laboratory-based phase-contrast imaging due to the relatively high brightness and small spot size.