Abstract
Multimodal imaging is an active branch of research as it has the potential to improve common medical imaging techniques. Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is an example of a low resolution, functional imaging modality that typically has very low resolution due to the ill-posedness of its underlying inverse problem. Combining the functional information of DOT with a high resolution structural imaging modality has been studied widely. In particular, the combination of DOT with ultrasound (US) could serve as a useful tool for clinicians for the formulation of accurate diagnosis of breast lesions. In this paper, we propose a novel method for US-guided DOT reconstruction using a portable time-domain measurement system. B-mode US imaging is used to retrieve morphological information on the probed tissues by means of a semi-automatical segmentation procedure based on active contour fitting. A two-dimensional to three-dimensional extrapolation procedure, based on the concept of distance transform, is then applied to generate a three-dimensional edge-weighting prior for the regularization of DOT. The reconstruction procedure has been tested on experimental data obtained on specifically designed dual-modality silicon phantoms. Results show a substantial quantification improvement upon the application of the implemented technique.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synergistic tomographic image reconstruction: part 2’.
Highlights
Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is a medical imaging technique based on the injection and collection of near infrared and visible light in tissue [1]
We describe the study of a combined US-DOT set-up based on the time-domain probe being developed by the SOLUS consortium [33]
The instrumental response function, taking into account the finite width of the light source, and other possible broadening factors, such as fibre temporal dispersion, detector response, etc., is used in the generation of the Jacobian by convolution with equation (2.6). Both source and detection fibres were manually switched between 8 different locations, resulting into a single DOT acquisition composed by 64 source-detector pairs
Summary
Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is a medical imaging technique based on the injection and collection of near infrared and visible light in tissue [1] Recent progress in this technology has seen significant advances in developing miniaturized devices at low cost [2,3]. Clinical uptake of this modality has been limited by the low resolution, artefacts and high noise in the reconstructed images, which is a consequence of the severe ill-posedness of the inverse problem Despite these drawbacks, DOT is still an active and growing branch of research worldwide because of its non-invasiveness and cost-effectiveness with respect to other commonly used imaging techniques [4]. After presenting a method for the extraction of relevant information from US B-mode images and their application to generate structural priors for optical reconstruction, we show its applicability on experimental data gathered from developed silicone phantoms
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