Feasibility testing of a pre-clinical coded aperture phase contrast imaging configuration using a simple fast Monte Carlo simulator.

A simple method of simulating possible coded aperture phase contrast X-ray imaging apparatus is presented. The method is based on ray tracing, with the rays treated ballistically within a voxelized sample and with the phase-shift-induced angular deviations and absorptions applied at a plane in the middle of the sample. For the particular case of a coded aperture phase contrast configuration suitable for small animal pre-clinical imaging we present results obtained using a high resolution voxel array representation of a mathematically-defined 'digital' mouse. At the end of the article a link to the software is supplied.