Optimizing contrast and spatial resolution in hard X-ray tomography of medically relevant tissues

Hard X-ray tomography with Paganin's widespread single-distance phase retrieval filter improves contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) while reducing spatial resolution (SR). We demonstrate that a Gaussian filter provided larger CNR at high SR with interpretable density measurements for two medically relevant soft tissue samples. Paganin's filter produced larger CNR at low SR, though \emph{a priori} assumptions were generally false and image quality gains diminish for CNR $>1$. Therefore, simple absorption measurements of low-$Z$ specimens combined with Gaussian filtering can provide improved image quality and model-independent density measurements compared to single-distance phase retrieval.