Compressed X-ray phase-contrast imaging using a coded source

X-ray phase-contrast imaging (XPCI) holds great promise for medical X-ray imaging with high soft-tissue contrast. Obviating optical elements in the imaging chain, propagation-based XPCI (PB-XPCI) has definite advantages over other XPCI techniques in terms of cost, alignment and scalability. However, it imposes strict requirements on the spatial coherence of the source and the resolution of the detector. In this study, we demonstrate that using a coded X-ray source and sparsity-based reconstruction, we can significantly relax these requirements. Using numerical simulation, we assess the feasibility of our approach and study the effect of system parameters on the reconstructed image. The results are demonstrated with images obtained using a bench-top micro-focus XPCI system.