Affiliations: Department of Radiology, University of Alabama at
Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35233, USA | Center for Bioengineering and School of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019, USA
Note: [] Corresponding author: Xizeng Wu, Ph.D., Department of Radiology,
University of Alabama at Birmingham, 619 S 19 street, Birmingham, AL 35233,
USA. Tel.: +1 205 975 8135; E-mail: xwu@uabmc.edu
Abstract: In clinical x-ray phase imaging, the significant tissue attenuation
cannot be ignored. In x-ray phase tomography, the presence of tissue
attenuation requires acquisition of at least two images for the retrieval of
tissue phase for a given tomographic view. This paper presents an important
observation that the same map of the projected electron densities can determine
both the phase and attenuation maps of soft tissues, provided that the
dominance of incoherent scattering holds. Based on this observation a new
strategy to perform the phase retrieval was developed. A 3-D phase tomography
reconstruction formula was derived, which combines the three-dimensional
inverse Radon transform with the phase retrievals for soft tissues. This new
formula alleviates all the technical difficulties associated with the
requirement of acquiring two images per tomographic view for phase-retrievals
in x-ray phase tomography.
