Press releases
Please quote Nature Materials as the source of these items.
January 2008
The dark side of X-ray imaging
A type of X-ray imaging that shows detail otherwise lost, and which is compatible with conventional radiography instrumentation is now feasible, reports a study published online this week in Nature Materials. This technique offers unprecedented resolution for several applications, including medical imaging, security screening and industrial non-destructive testing.
Dark-field imaging is commonly used in visible light microscopy, and it enables details to be resolved that are otherwise smeared out in the direct reflection mode or bright field. The quality of the dark-field image depends on the intensity of the light scattered by the object. With X-rays, however it has always been difficult to have a high enough signal-to-noise ratio, and therefore the use of X-ray dark-field imaging has usually been restricted to very-high-intensity light sources, such as synchrotrons.
Franz Pfeiffer and colleagues have shown that by using an appropriate arrangement of certain optical components it is possible to obtain a high signal-to-noise ratio even with conventional X-ray tubes, as they demonstrate by revealing the very fine structure of bones in a chicken wing.
