Diffraction-enhanced imaging microradiography applied in breast samples.

The diffraction-enhanced imaging (DEI) is a powerful tool to observe tumors and other diseases in breast tissue and provide more precise diagnostics. In this work DEI was used to analyze breast tissues details that have poor attenuation contrast. An X-ray imaging system with DEI techniques was developed using synchrotron radiation. The DEI experiment was performed in D10A-XRD2 beamline at the Brazilian Synchrotron--LNLS. The pre-monochromator, upstream of the beamline was adjusted to 10.7 keV. The samples were positioned between two channel-cut Si(333) in non-dispersive geometry mounted in a double axes diffractometer. A direct conversion water-cooled CCD camera of 1242 pixel x 1152 pixel of 25 microm x 25 microm each was used as a two-dimensional detector in scanning mode. The DEI system could show details in low attenuation tissues based on the contrast imaging obtained by attenuation, refraction gradient and ultra-small angle scatter characteristics. In this work the capacity to observe different types of structures and details in breast tissues were investigated.