Practical table-top X-ray scatter tomography

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

12:15pm | Hudson Hall - Room 208

Presenter

Dr. Joel Greenberg , Assistant Research Professor, CAXI Project Manager, Duke Imaging and Spectroscopy Program (DISP), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

My research focuses on applying computational imaging techniques to X-ray imaging  in order to maximize the measurable information and/or information rate.  This is especially important in X-ray scatter tomography, where small scatter cross sections, highly lossy optics, and expensive detectors have historically made real-time operation with conventional components impractical.  Overcoming these challenges involves the co-design of software and hardware through physical modeling, the use of optical elements known generally as reference structures, and the implementation of compressive sensing algorithms.  Examples of the advantages of scatter imaging, as compared to conventional transmission imaging, include the ability to perform snapshot tomography, realize novel geometries, and obtain material-specific information about the object being imaged.  The ability to perform X-ray scatter tomography in a compact, real-time way therefore has important applications in all areas where X-ray imaging or X-ray diffraction are currently in use, including to national security, industrial (i.e. non-destructive testing) and medical imaging.

Dr. Greenberg received his B.S.E. from Princeton University in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2005 and his PhD in physics from Duke University in 2012 for his work on collective nonlinear optical phenomena in cold atoms.  After a short post-doc at Duke studying nonlinear dispersion control in optical fibers, he joined the DISP group in Duke's ECE department as a research scientist.  He is currently the project manager for the multi-institutional Computational Adaptive X-ray Imaging (CAXI) program and an Assistant Research Professor in the ECE department.