Medical physics and lab astrophysics – Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics

We use techniques developed in astrophysics and astroparticle physics to advance experimental techniques in other areas such as medical physics, non-destructive testing and laboratory astrophysics.

X-ray imaging is well known by everybody. An attenuation image is taken for medical diagnostics and non-destructive testing.

X-ray phase-contrast and dark-field imaging additionally provides information about the phase-shift and the scattering of the incoming x-ray wave. For this purpose a Talbot-Lau interferometer is used. Interferometric effects are exploited to measure the three different images: attenuation, differential phase-contrast and dark-field image.

Figure 1: Recording of a mouse in all three image contrast modalities obtained within one grating interferometer measurement process: attenuation (top); differential phase-contrast (middle) and dark-field (bottom).

In Figure 1 all three images of a mouse are shown. On top the attenuation image shows a high contrast between high absorbing structures inside the mouse like bones and low absorbing structures like tissue. In the middle especially edges between different materials are enhanced in the differential phase-contrast image. The dark-field image on the bottom reveals scattering structures like the alveoli of the lung and the hairs.

The main goal of the our group at ECAP is to evaluate the potential of phase-contrast imaging for as medical physics, non-destructive testing and laboratory astrophysics and to further improve the feasibility of phase-contrast and dark-field imaging. We coperate closely with the Phase-Contrast Imaging group at the Pattern Recognition Lab in the Computing science department (https://www5.cs.fau.de/research/groups/x-ray-phase-contrast/).