X-ray phase-contrast imaging (PCI) is a new emerging imaging technique that generates a high spatial resolution and high contrast of biological soft tissues compared to conventional radiography. Herein a biomedical application of diffraction enhanced imaging ( DEI) is presented. As one of the PCI methods, DEI derives contrast from many different kinds of sample information, such as the sample's X-ray absorption, refraction gradient and ultra-small-angle X-ray scattering (USAXS) properties, and the sample information is expressed by three parametric images. Combined with computed tomography (CT), DEI-CT can produce 3D volumetric images of the sample and can be used for investigating micro-structures of biomedical samples. Our DEI experiments for liver samples were implemented at the topography station of Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility (BSRF). The results show that by using our provided information extraction method and DEI-CT reconstruction approach, the obtained parametric images clearly display the inner structures of liver tissues and the morphology of blood vessels. Furthermore, the reconstructed 3D view of the liver blood vessels exhibits the micro blood vessels whose minimum diameter is on the order of about tens of microns, much better than its conventional CT reconstruction at a millimeter resolution. In conclusion, both the information extraction method and DEI-CT have the potential for use in biomedical micro-structures analysis. (C) 2009 National Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier Limited and Science in China Press. All rights reserved.