Low-dose and fast grating-based x-ray phase-contrast imaging

X-ray phase-contrast imaging has experienced rapid development over the last few decades, and, in this technology, the phase modulation strategy of phase stepping (PS) is used most widely to measure the sample's phase signal. However, because of its discontinuous nature, PS has the defects of worse mechanical stability and high exposure dose, which greatly hinder its wide use in dynamic phase measurement and potential clinical applications. We demonstrate preliminary research on the use of integrating-bucket (IB) phase modulation method to retrieve the phase information in grating-based x-ray phase-contrast imaging. Experimental results show that our proposed method can be well employed to extract the differential phase-contrast image, compared with the commonly used PS strategy, the advantage of the IB phase modulation technique is that fast measurement and low dose are promising. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.