Improving radiation dose efficiency of X-ray differential phase contrast imaging using an energy-resolving grating interferometer and a novel rank constraint

In this paper, a novel method was developed to improve the radiation dose efficiency, viz., contrast to noise ratio normalized by dose (CNRD), of the grating-based X-ray differential phase contrast (DPC) imaging system that is integrated with an energy-resolving photon counting detector. The method exploits the low-dimensionality of the spatial-spectral DPC image matrix acquired from different energy windows. A low rank approximation of the spatial-spectral image matrix was developed to reduce image noise while retaining the DPC signal accuracy for every energy window. Numerical simulations and experimental phantom studies have been performed to validate the proposed method by showing noise reduction and CNRD improvement for each energy window.