abstract
- Edge illumination single mask (EISM) is an x-ray phase-contrast imaging method that simultaneously retrieves absorption and differential phase-shift information from a single image. Recent applications have focused on exploiting this method to obtain additional information, such as projected thickness maps of the materials composing the sample. This study presents a two-dimensional computational comparison of two EISM multi-material phase retrieval approaches¿the Beltran approach and the spectral multi-material decomposition approach¿to evaluate their suitability for retrieving the projected thickness of different materials in two complex samples. To enable a comparison under equivalent absorbed dose conditions, the Beltran approach is combined with energy-weighting. The results demonstrate that the spectral multi-material decomposition approach provides higher contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) than the energy-weighted Beltran approach when retrieving the projected thickness of a single material. However, its CNR decreases as the number of materials to be retrieved increases. While the energy-weighted Beltran approach shows higher CNR in the projected thickness maps retrieved, the spectral multi-material decomposition approach excels at isolating each material¿s contribution and providing projected thickness maps that are free of residual cross-material visibility in regions containing overlapping materials.