Compressive Sensing for Dynamic XRF Scanning

Abstract

X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) scanning is a widespread technique of high importance and impact since it provides chemical composition maps crucial for several scientific investigations. There are continuous requirements for larger, faster and highly resolved acquisitions in order to study complex structures. Among the scientific applications that benefit from it, some of them, such as wide scale brain imaging, are prohibitively difficult due to time constraints. However, typically the overall XRF imaging performance is improving through technological progress on XRF detectors and X-ray sources. This paper suggests an additional approach where XRF scanning is performed in a sparse way by skipping specific points or by varying dynamically acquisition time or other scan settings in a conditional manner. This paves the way for Compressive Sensing in XRF scans where data are acquired in a reduced manner allowing for challenging experiments, currently not feasible with the traditional scanning strategies. A series of different compressive sensing strategies for dynamic scans are presented here. A proof of principle experiment was performed at the TwinMic beamline of Elettra synchrotron. The outcome demonstrates the potential of Compressive Sensing for dynamic scans, suggesting its use in challenging scientific experiments while proposing a technical solution for beamline acquisition software.

Soft X-ray Fluorescence and Near-Edge Absorption Microscopy for Investigating Metabolic Features in Biological Systems: A Review

“…As for other analytical methods, the accessible chemical elements are intrinsically limited as they are determined by the specific energy range. Moreover, in the soft X-ray regime, restrictions do exist in terms of sample size, sample thickness and acquisition time, even if there is a global trend to overcome these limitations both improving the experimental environment [ 51 , 53 ], the light sources [ 68 ] and the detectors [ 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 ], and employing some expedients to reduce the sampling frequency or to automatize the acquisition process [ 75 , 76 ].…”

Resolution enhancement in micro-XRF using image restoration techniques

“…52 Furthermore, as an image reconstruction technique, compressive sensing was also introduced, which demonstrated the capability of acquiring high-resolution XRF images with less measuring time. 53,54 It is possible to integrate these methods to obtain high-resolution XRFs more efficiently. Thus, the current investigation of image restoration methods was preliminary, and more investigation especially on blind and deep learning methods is necessary.…”

Soft X-ray Microscopy Techniques for Medical and Biological Imaging at TwinMic—Elettra

“…It is based on the assumption that the "most useful" datasets are smartly acquired, while the less significant ones can be easily extrapolated by a fast or small dataset. Inspired by this idea, we have recently developed in TwinMic a set of approaches [70,71] that allow us to perform dynamic scans where it is possible to skip points (sparse) and perform acquisitions with variable parameters (i.e., acquisition time). Such an approach leads to a substantial reduction in the required time, besides reducing the size of stored datasets.…”