Abstract
Optical imaging offers exquisite sensitivity and resolution for assessing biological tissue in microscopy applications; however, for samples that are greater than a few hundred microns in thickness (such as whole tissue biopsies), spatial resolution is substantially limited by the effects of light scattering. To improve resolution, time- and angular-domain methods have been developed to reject detection of highly scattered light. This work utilizes a modified version of a commonly used Monte Carlo light propagation software package (MCML) to present the first comparison of time- and angular-domain improvements in spatial resolution with respect to varying sample thickness and optical properties (absorption and scattering). Specific comparisons were made at various tissue thicknesses (1-6 mm) assuming either typical (average) soft tissue scattering properties, μs ' = 10 cm-1, or low scattering properties, μs ' = 3.4 cm-1, as measured in lymph nodes.
Highlights
Optical imaging is used extensively for assessing biological tissue specimens through tissue staining and microscopy of thin tissue slices taken from selected locations of the specimens
The above values are comparable to the coefficients presented in the literature, which were found to be in the range 45 – 153 cm−1 at 1320 nm using optical coherence tomography [23]
The culmination of the simulation and lymph node optical property experimental results presented in this work provides guidance for the development of optical projection tomography (OPT) systems for tissue biopsy and in particular lymph nodes
Summary
Optical imaging is used extensively for assessing biological tissue specimens (biopsies) through tissue staining and microscopy of thin tissue slices taken from selected locations of the specimens. Simulations were carried out with an augmented version of a commonly used Monte Carlo simulation subroutine, mcsub.c [14,15], which was optimized for GPU parallelization and modified such that the path and exit angles of the light that “hit” the designated detector was saved separately from the overall fluence map This was critical for comparing time- and angular-domain resolution and contrast tradeoffs. The augmented Monte Carlo code is available to anyone upon a request
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