Towards x-ray phase contrast tomography in clinical conditions: simulation and phase retrieval development

X-ray phase contrast imaging has been proven to have a great interest for the diagnosis and the study of many different pathologies, especially for osteoarticular diseases as it allows to visualize every kind of tissue of the joint within a single image. For the time being, phase contrast tomography has been reserved to synchrotrons and its clinical transfer has therefore become a major challenge in the past decades. Different phase contrast imaging techniques are currently studied for that purpose: Grating interferometry, edge illumination and more recently speckle-based imaging. Because of its simplicity, in this work we study the possibility of transferring speckle-based imaging on conventional x-ray sources. The main challenges we have to face are the loss of spatial and temporal coherence of the conventional sources and the loss in resolution when compared to synchrotrons. We present here a numerical simulation code that we can use to study the influence of different experimental parameters. We also introduce a new phase retrieval algorithm for low coherence systems and compare it to already existing ones, showing that it is already performs well, even for conventional sources.