Propagation of laser-produced short X-ray pulses through scattering media: Application to scatter-reduced medical imaging

We use Monte-Carlo simulations to calculate X-ray pulse broadening and the amount of scattered light emerging from a scattering sample. This allows us to estimate the achievable scatter suppression factor and the image quality improvement for temporally gated imaging systems. Best scatter suppression is possible for X-ray photon energies above ∼30 keV and gating times in the sub-50 ps region. Preliminary experiments show image quality improvements close to the calculated values.