Simulation based evaluation of a fan beam coded aperture X-ray diffraction imaging system for biospecimen analysis

X-ray diffraction (XRD) imaging yields spatially resolved, material-specific information, which can aid medical diagnosis and inform treatment. In this work we used simulations to analyze the utility of fan beam coded aperture XRD imaging for fast, high-resolution scatter imaging of biospecimens for tissue assessment. To evaluate the proposed system's utility in a specific task, we employed a deterministic model to produce simulated data from biologically realistic breast tissue phantoms and model-based reconstruction to recover a spatial map of the XRD signatures throughout the phantoms. We found an XRD spatial resolution of ≈1 mm with a mean reconstructed spectral accuracy of 0.98 ± 0.01 for a simulated 1 × 150 mm2 fan beam operating at 160 kVp, 10 mA, and 4.5 s exposures. A classifier for cancer detection was developed utilizing cross-correlation of XRD spectra against a spectral library, with a receiver operating characteristic curve with an area under the curve value of 0.972. Our results indicated a potential diagnostic modality that could aid in tasks ranging from analysis of ex-vivo pathology biospecimens to intraoperative cancer margin assessment, motivating future work to develop an experimental system while enabling the development of improved algorithms for imaging and tissue analysis-based classification performance.