Phase-contrast tomosynthetic experiment on biological samples with synchrotron radiation

Tomosynthesis is one of three-dimensional imaging techniques that can remove the effect of overlapping phenomena in radiography, except for computed tomography (CT). In general, CT needs at least hundreds of projections to reconstruct every cross-sectional slice of the samples accurately, while tomosynthesis just requires dozens of projections to reconstruct a series of tomosynthetic slices approximately, Conventional tomosynthesis based on attenuation contrast shows poor results when imaging weakly-absorption objects such as biological samples. In this paper, we present a new type of tomosynthesis, named phase contrast tomosynthesis, combining X-ray phase-contrast imaging mechanism and tomosynthesis, which can obtain higher resolution and image quality for the biological samples with fewer radiation doses and avoid overlapping phenomena. A phase contrast tomosynthetic experiment on a guinea pig cochlea at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) was done to evaluate the performances of various reconstruction algorithms integrated with the in-line phase retrieval method.