DEI-based phase-contrast tomosynthetic experiment on biological samples with high resolution X-ray CCD camera

Hard X-ray phase-contrast imaging has extremely high sensitivity of weakly absorbing low-Z samples in medical and biological fields. Phase-contrast radiographic images have superposition phenomenon, while phase-contrast computed tomographic images reveal quantitative distribution of refractive index of the samples. But computed tomography requires long exposure time and lots of doses which are likely to damage biological specimens or live samples. We propose differential phase-contrast tomosynthesis based on diffraction enhanced imaging (DEI) to rapidly inspect the samples with a few projections. An experiment on biological samples is performed to prove it can highly enhance the information of detailed structures and mostly remove superposition phenomenon.