Objective: Quantitative technique based on In-line phase-contrast computed tomography with single scanning attracts more attention in application due to the flexibility of the implementation. However, the quantitative results usually suffer from artifacts and noise since the phase retrieval and reconstruction are independent ("two-step") without feedback from the original data. The work aims to investigate a method for material quantitation to improve the image quality of In-line tomography within single scanning.
Method: An iterative method based Fresnel diffraction imaging model is developed in this work, which directly reconstructs the refractive index decrement δ and imaginary β of the object from observed data ("one-step"). Moreover, high-quality material decomposition results are obtained by using a linear approximation in the iterative process.
Results: Compared with the existing methods, Our method shows a higher peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity in numerical experimental results. Additionally, the quantitation accuracy of the proposed method is greater than 97.2 % by calculating the equivalent atomic number of the decomposed basic material in the real experiment.
Conclusion: We demonstrate that this one-step method greatly reduces noise and improves quantitative reconstruction and decomposition results.
Significance: This algorithm has the potential for quantitative imaging research using In-line tomography in future biomedical applications.