Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, May 22, 2017
SPECIAL SEMINAR: X-Ray Dark-Field Digital Tomosynthesis Imaging
Yongshuai Ge (student of Dr. Guang-Hong Chen)
RResearch Assistant, Department of Medical Physics, UW-School of Medicine & Public Health, Madison, WI - USA
X-ray digital tomosynthesis is becoming more and more popular in both pre-clinical and clinical imaging. As a pseudo-tomographic imaging method, it can effectively reduce structural overlap inherent to planar x-ray absorption imag-ing. However, the capability of x-ray absorption imaging to resolve fine-scale and low attenuating features in current digital tomosynthesis imaging is lim-ited. This work presents a novel x-ray tomosynthesis imaging method that produces not only conventional absorption contrast images, but also x-ray dark-field contrast images from the same tomosynthesis dataset that acquired from a Talbot-Lau interferometer based multi-contrast benchtop imaging sys-tem. The initial proof-of-concept experimental studies demonstrated that the dark-field tomosynthesis images provide superior sensitivity to small struc-tures such as microcalcifications, calcified ducts in human breast, microbub-bles, and detailed textures in biological samples. These images enjoy both the benefits of the tomosynthesis imaging method (reduced structural overlap) and the dark-field imaging method (improved sensitivity to small structures).