An optimized engineering design of imaging probe for time-resolved diffuse optical tomography system

Abstract

We proposed an optimized engineering design of an imaging probe for time-resolved diffuse optical tomography system to increase the sensitivity of signal detection from tested objects. With limited number of sources and detectors, we considered an automatic rotational probe to generate more measurement pairs as well as more detection angles, compared to probes with equal number of sources and detectors. We also considered optimizing the arrangements of sources and detectors on the imaging probe to collect more information from the tested domain than those random arrangements. The method for selecting optimized sources' and detectors' positions is based on Cramer-Rao lower bound. Image reconstruction results of semi-infinite domain using phantom experimental data from different patterns of source and detector arrangements are presented. We demonstrated that the optimized source and detector arrangements chosen based on the reconstruction results match the choices from the optimized selecting methods. Thus we selected the optimized sets for the imaging probe.