A fast-converging iterative method for X-ray in-line phase contrast tomography

Abstract

X-ray in-line phase contrast tomography holds great promise for the quantitative analysis of soft materials. However, its applications have been limited, so far, by the fact that direct methods based on the transport-of-intensity equation and the contrast transfer function are sensitive to noise and applicable only to limited types of samples. Here, we propose an iterative method based on the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm (R. W. Gerchberg and W. O. Saxton, Optik 35, 237 (1972)), but overcoming its slow convergence by an acceleration technique, named random signed feedback, which shows an excellent performance, both in numerical simulation and tomographic experiment, of discriminating various polymers even when using 53 keV synchrotron X-rays. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.