Edge illumination x-ray phase contrast simulations using the CAD-ASTRA toolbox

Abstract

Edge illumination x-ray phase contrast imaging (XPCI) provides increased contrast for low absorbing materials compared to attenuation images and sheds light on the material microstructure through dark field contrast. To apply XPCI in areas such as non-destructive testing and inline inspection, where scanned samples are increasingly compared to simulated reference images, accurate and efficient simulation software is required. However, currently available simulators rely on expensive Monte Carlo techniques or wave-optics frameworks, resulting in long simulation times. Furthermore, these simulators are often not optimized to work with computer-aided design (CAD) models, a common and memory-efficient method to represent manufactured objects, hindering their integration in an inspection pipeline. In this work, we address these shortcomings by introducing an edge illumination XPCI simulation framework built upon the recently developed CAD-ASTRA toolbox. CAD-ASTRA allows for the efficient simulation of x-ray projections from CAD models through GPU-accelerated ray tracing and supports ray refraction in a geometric optics framework. The edge illumination implementation is validated and its performance is benchmarked against GATE, a state-of-the-art Monte Carlo simulator, revealing a simulation speed increase of up to three orders of magnitude, while maintaining high accuracy in the resulting images.