Locality estimates for Fresnel-wave-propagation and stability of X-ray phase contrast imaging with finite detectors

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the stability of X-ray phase contrast imaging with finite detectors, revealing that while the problem is severely ill-posed, stable reconstruction is possible within a resolution limit determined by detector size and Fresnel number.

Contribution

It provides the first quantitative analysis of the locality and stability in Fresnel-wave-propagation with finite detectors, establishing resolution limits for stable image reconstruction.

Findings

Image reconstruction is severely ill-posed with finite detectors.

Lipschitz-stability holds within a resolution limit depending on detector size.

The smallest resolvable lengthscale is inversely proportional to the Fresnel number.

Abstract

Coherent wave-propagation in the near-field Fresnel-regime is the underlying contrast-mechanism to (propagation-based) X-ray phase contrast imaging (XPCI), an emerging lensless technique that enables 2D- and 3D-imaging of biological soft tissues and other light-element samples down to nanometer-resolutions. Mathematically, propagation is described by the Fresnel-propagator, a convolution with an arbitrarily non-local kernel. As real-world detectors may only capture a finite field-of-view, this non-locality implies that the recorded diffraction-patterns are necessarily incomplete. This raises the question of stability of image-reconstruction from the truncated data -- even if the complex-valued wave-field, and not just its modulus, could be measured. Contrary to the latter restriction of the acquisition, known as the phase-problem, the finite-detector-problem has not received much attention in literature. The present work therefore analyzes locality of Fresnel-propagation in order to establish stability of XPCI with finite detectors. Image-reconstruction is shown to be severely ill-posed in this setting -- even without a phase-problem. However, quantitative estimates of the leaked wave-field reveal that Lipschitz-stability holds down to a sharp resolution limit that depends on the detector-size and varies within the field-of-view. The smallest resolvable lengthscale is found to be 1/F times the detector's aspect length, where F is the Fresnel number associated with the latter scale. The stability results are extended to phaseless imaging in the linear contrast-transfer-function regime.