A LabVIEW based user-friendly X-ray phase-contrast imaging system software platform

TL;DR

This paper presents a user-friendly LabVIEW software platform for X-ray phase-contrast imaging, enabling integrated control, automatic image acquisition, and data processing to facilitate experimental procedures.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, easy-to-use software platform that manages hardware control, image acquisition, and data processing for a new X-ray phase-contrast imaging system.

Findings

Unified control of multiple hardware components

Automatic phase-stepping image acquisition

Enhanced user support during experiments

Abstract

X-ray phase-contrast imaging can provide greatly improved contrast over conventional absorption-based imaging for weakly absorbing samples, such as biological soft tissues and fibre composites. In this manuscript, we introduce an easy and fast way to develop a user-friendly software platform dedicated to the new grating-based X-ray phase-contrast imaging setup recently built at the National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory of the University of Science and Technology of China. Unified management and control of 21 motorized positioning stages, of an ultra-precision piezoelectric translation stage and of the X-ray tube are achieved with this platform. The software package also covers the automatic image acquisition of the phase-stepping scanning with a flat panel detector. Moreover, a data post-processing module for signals retrieval and other custom features are in principle available. With a seamless integration of all necessary functions in a unique package, this software platform will greatly support the user activity during experimental runs.