Grating-based tomography applications in biomedical engineering

摘要

For the investigation of soft tissues or tissues consisting of soft and hard tissues on the microscopic level, hard X-ray phase tomography has become one of the most suitable imaging techniques. Besides other phase contrast methods grating interferometry has the advantage of higher sensitivity than inline methods and the quantitative results. One disadvantage of the conventional double-grating setup (XDGI) compared to inline methods is the limitation of the spatial resolution. This limitation can be overcome by removing the analyser grating resulting in a single-grating setup (XSGI). In order to verify the performance of XSGI concerning contrast and spatial resolution, a quantitative comparison of XSGI and XDGI tomograms of a human nerve was performed. Both techniques provide sufficient contrast to allow for the distinction of tissue types. The spatial resolution of the two-fold binned XSGI data set is improved by a factor of two in comparison to XDGI which underlies its performance in tomography of soft tissues. Another application for grating-based X-ray phase tomography is the simultaneous visualization of soft and hard tissues of a plaque-containing coronary artery. The simultaneous visualization of both tissues is important for the segmentation of the lumen. The segmented data can be used for flow simulations in order to obtain information about the three-dimensional wall shear stress distribution needed for the optimization of mechano-sensitive nanocontainers used for drug delivery.