Edge-illumination X-ray phase contrast imaging: Matching the imaging method to the detector technology

© 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab srl. X-Ray Phase Contrast Imaging (XPCI) has been arguably the hottest topic in X-ray imaging research over the last two decades, due to the significant advantages it can bring to medicine, biology, material science and many other areas of application. Considerable progress has recently been achieved, in terms of the first in vivo implementations at synchrotrons (notably at Elettra in Trieste), and of new XPCI methods working with conventional sources. Among the latter, edge-illumination (EI) is possibly one of the most promising in terms of mainstream translation, due to set-up simplicity, scalability and flux efficiency compared to other approaches. EI is indeed the only method working with a completely incoherent source: however, it was recently demonstrated that neither the ability to perform quantitative phase retrieval, nor the method's phase sensitivity are affected by the source's incoherence. Here its implementation with different detector technologies is discussed.