ZEISS Phase Contrast Enhancer for XRM

One of the biggest challenges of X-ray microscopy, particularly when imaging at high resolution, is that of phase contrast. Differences in wave speed between materials leads to the development of phase fringes. These fringes can be informative, particularly when they help to emphasize small features with limited absorption contrast, however they can obscure subtle variations in contrast that may be required for segmentation or quantification.

ZEISS Phase Contrast Enhancer for XRM removes these phase artifacts by explicit modeling of the phase artifact, then deconvolving it in 3D across the entire volume. It provides an intuitive workflow-based interface for the determination of the phase fringe size and shape, allowing for rapid and optimal phase removal. Once phase effects are removed, only traditional absorption contrast remains, making the dataset very amenable to denoising algorithms. To facilitate a simple additional denoising step, a non-local means denoising tool is included, and can be activated as an additional automated step in the workflow.

ZEISS Phase Contrast Enhancer can be seamlessly inserted into an XRM analysis workflow, maintaining all XRM metadata in its native format.