An In-House Cone-Beam Tomographic Reconstruction Package for Laboratory X-ray Phase-Contrast Imaging

Phase-contrast, and in general, multi-modal, X-ray micro-tomography is proven to be very useful for low-density, low-attention samples enabling much better contrast than its attenuation-based pendant. Therefore, it is increasingly applied in bio- and life sciences primarily dealing with such samples. Although there is a plethora of literature regarding phase-retrieval algorithms, access to implementations of those algorithms is relatively limited and very few packages combining phase-retrieval methods with the full tomographic reconstruction pipeline are available. This is especially the case for laboratory-based phase-contrast imaging typically featuring cone-beam geometry. We present here an in-house cone-beam tomographic reconstruction package for laboratory X-ray phase-contrast imaging. It covers different phase-contrast techniques and phase retrieval methods. The paper explains their implementation and integration in the filtered back projection chain. Their functionality and efficiency will be demonstrated through applications on a few dedicated samples.