Dark-field Tomography: Modeling and Reconstruction

Abstract: Dark-field images are formed by small-angle scattering of x-ray photons. The small-angle scattering signal is particularly sensitive to structural variations and density fluctuation on a length scale of several ten to hundred nanometers, offering a new contrast mechanism to reveal subtle structural variation of object. In this paper, we derive a novel physical model to describe x-ray absorption and small-angle scattering, and use the proposed model to reconstruct the volumetric small-angle scattering images. The numerical experiments and test experiments demonstrate that the reconstructed scattering images reveal unique features with a high contrast resolution. The proposed approach has great potential in biomedical imaging, nondestructive detections, and other applications.