Achromatic approach to phase-based multi-modal imaging with conventional X-ray sources

Compatibility with polychromatic radiation is an important requirement for an imaging system using conventional rotating anode X-ray sources. With a commercially available energy-resolving single-photon-counting detector we investigated how broadband radiation affects the performance of a multi-modal edge-illumination phase-contrast imaging system. The effect of X-ray energy on phase retrieval is presented, and the achromaticity of the method is experimentally demonstrated. Comparison with simulated measurements integrating over the energy spectrum shows that there is no significant loss of image quality due to the use of polychromatic radiation. This means that, to a good approximation, the imaging system exploits radiation in the same way at all energies typically used in hard-X-ray imaging.