Evaluating microstructural damages in unstained ovarian, endometrial, and liver tissues with speckle-based phase-contrast and dark-field CT

When it comes to human tissues, the sub-µm length scale plays a fundamental role in understanding tissue changes, whether it is caused by tumours or other organ-specific pathologies. This proposal aims at performing X-ray speckle-based tomography on samples like ovarian, endometrial, and liver tissues for a deeper understanding of the local changes in the microstructures resulting from a specific pathology (endometriosis, steatosis), a neoplastic transformation, or a cryopreservation procedure (vitrification). To that end, X-ray speckle-based imaging (SBI) has recently shown high potential, thanks to its high sensitivity to small density differences in unstained soft tissues. Unlike other techniques, SBI also provides additional information about small-angle scattering, known as dark-field. With the dark-field signal, it is possible both to improve the visualisation of sub-resolution microstructure alterations and to quantitatively detect the orientation of anisotropic structures.