Researchers have developed a new, focus-free technique for creating chemical maps using x-ray fluorescence. The approach offers fast, high-resolution measurements, which could be useful for analyzing chemical composition for a range of applications in biomedicine.
The new x-ray computational ghost fluorescence approach produces two sets of data for each photon energy — one with the spatial distributions of the input beam and one with the emitted fluorescence measurements. A computer program then puts these data together and overlays all the imaging data from the various photon energies to create a chemical element map of the object.