On the noise-resolution duality, Heisenberg uncertainty and Shannon's information

Several variations of the Heisenberg uncertainty inequality are derived on the basis of "noise-resolution duality" recently proposed by the authors. The same approach leads to a related inequality that provides an upper limit for the information capacity of imaging systems in terms of the number of imaging quanta (particles) used in the experiment. These results can be useful in the context of biomedical imaging constrained by the radiation dose delivered to the sample, or in imaging (e.g. astronomical) problems under "low light" conditions

CT dose reduction factors in the thousands using X-ray phase contrast

Phase-contrast X-ray imaging can improve the visibility of weakly absorbing objects (e.g. soft tissues) by an order of magnitude or more compared to conventional radiographs. Previously, it has been shown that combining phase retrieval with computed tomography (CT) can increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by up to two orders of magnitude over conventional CT at the same radiation dose, without loss of image quality. Our experiments reveal that as radiation dose decreases, the relative improvement in SNR increases. We discovered this enhancement can be traded for a reduction in dose greater than the square of the gain in SNR. Upon reducing the dose 300 fold, the phase-retrieved SNR was still almost 10 times larger than the absorption contrast data. This reveals the potential for dose reduction factors in the tens of thousands without loss in image quality, which would have a profound impact on medical and industrial imaging applications