Preliminary research on body composition measurement using X-ray phase contrast imaging

Abstract

Body composition measurement is of cardinal significance for medical and clinical applications. Currently, the dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) technique is widely applied for this measurement. In this study, we present a novel measurement method using the absorption and phase information obtained simultaneously from the X-ray grating-based interferometer (XGI). Rather than requiring two projection data sets with different X-ray energy spectra, with the proposed method, both the areal densities of the bone and the surrounding soft tissue can be acquired utilizing one projection data set. By using a human body phantom constructed to validate the proposed method, experimental results have shown that the compositions can be calculated with an improved accuracy comparing to the dual energy method, especially for the soft tissue measurement. Since the proposed method can be easily implemented on current XGI setup, it will greatly extend the applications of the XGI, and meanwhile has the potential to be an alternative to DEXA for human body composition measurement.

Keywords: Body composition measurement; Dual-energy absorptiometry; Talbot-Lau interferometer; X-ray phase contrast imaging.