## 1 Introduction  
The Imaging and Medical Beamline (IMBL) at the Australian Synchrotron [1] is a hard X-ray beamline that has facilitated user experiments for more than a decade. Its superconducting multipole wiggler insertion device can produce nearly parallel polychromatic and monochromatic X-ray beams through a double-crystal Laue monochromator (DCLM), with energies ranging from 25 to 120 keV. The IMBL user experimental program encompasses a wide range of applications from materials to life sciences. In the majority of cases, experiments are performed under ambient conditions; however, for some material science applications, the beamline can incorporate specialized sample stages for heating [2], cooling, or performing in-liquid experiments. The sample can also be subjected to in situ loading during measurements, including tensile stress [3], compression, etc. For large, flat, laterally extended objects such as circuit boards or paintings, the nonconventional tomographic technique termed \"laminography\" can also be used [4]. Several imaging modalities can be utilized at IMBL for both two-dimensional (2D) and/or three-dimensional (3D) imaging, including propagation-based phase-contrast techniques [5; 6], grating-based techniques [7], speckle-based techniques [8], scatter-based techniques [9], and dark-field imaging [10]. The choice of technique depends largely on the specific application. Dynamic or high-speed imaging as a function of time [2; 11; 12] is also possible due to the comparatively high X-ray flux at IMBL. Furthermore, one of the IMBL's biggest strengths is its potential for medical and biomedical imaging applications, especially in regard to radiotherapy [13; 14; 15] and imaging/tomography [6; 16; 17]. Computed tomography (CT) is a 3D imaging technique [18; 19] to image the internal structures of an object without superimposing the layers of the object as in 2D projection images. The beamline is equipped with animal-holding facilities, a PC2-certified wet laboratory, surgical equipment, an anesthesia delivery system, ventilators, a biohazard cabinet, incubators for cell culture, and a cell analyzer [20]. These facilities act as in-house clinics and are important for sample preparation. Because both radiotherapy and imaging/tomography modalities at the IMBL have the potential for preclinical and clinical application development, a dedicated preclinical station including a small-animal irradiation stage is available to users of the beamline. Moreover, a 3D breast CT imaging facility with a rotating patient bed is under development for patient trials in the near future. There are six hutches at the IMBL in total. Hutches 1A, 2A, and 3A are the beam-conditioning hutches and contain X-ray optical elements. The experiment hutches are 1B, 2B, and 3B, in order of increasing distance from the source. Radiotherapy experiments [13] have mainly been conducted in Hutch 1B or 2B. Imaging and tomography experiments for small samples are conducted in Hutch 2B, while Hutch 3B can be used for imaging samples as large as a human torso due to the very wide (over 50 cm) beam available at that location. Hutch 3B is located in a satellite building, 140 m further away from the source to achieve a wide beam while also allowing for a large (up to 7 m) sample-to-detector distance for propagation-based phase-contrast imaging. A schematic diagram of the key components in these hutches can be found in [PERSON] et al. [20]. The interaction between the X-ray beam and the sample can be generally described by the complex refractive index at a given wavelength, \(n=1-\delta+i\beta\), where \(\delta\) is related to the phase shift, and \(\beta\) is related to the attenuation. Conventional X-ray projection images primarily depend on the linear attenuation coefficient, \(\mu(\lambda)=4\pi\beta(\lambda)/\lambda\), where \(\lambda\) is the X-ray wavelength.