Phase contrast image guidance for synchrotron microbeam radiotherapy

Recent image guidance developments for preclinical synchrotron microbeam radiotherapy represent a necessary step for future clinical translation of the technique. Image quality can be further improved using x-ray phase contrast, which is readily available at synchrotron facilities. We here describe a methodology for phase contrast image guidance at the Imaging and Medical Beamline at the Australian Synchrotron. Differential phase contrast is measured alongside conventional attenuation and used to improve the image quality. Post-processing based on the inverse Riesz transform is employed on the measured data to obtain noticeably sharper images. The procedure is extremely well suited for applications such as image guidance which require both visual assessment and sample alignment based on semi automatic image registration. Moreover, our approach can be combined with all other differential phase contrast imaging techniques, in all cases where a quantitative evaluation of the refractive index is not required.