Fast reconstruction of optical properties for complex segmentations in near infrared imaging

Abstract

The intrinsic ill-posed nature of the inverse problem in near infrared imaging makes the reconstruction of fine details of objects deeply embedded in turbid media challenging even for the large amounts of data provided by time-resolved cameras. In addition, most reconstruction algorithms for this type of measurements are only suitable for highly symmetric geometries and rely on a linear approximation to the diffusion equation since a numerical solution of the fully non-linear problem is computationally too expensive. In this paper, we will show that a problem of practical interest can be successfully addressed making efficient use of the totality of the information supplied by time-resolved cameras. We set aside the goal of achieving high spatial resolution for deep structures and focus on the reconstruction of complex arrangements of large regions. We show numerical results based on a combined approach of wavelength-normalized data and prior geometrical information, defining a fully parallelizable problem in arbitrary geometries for time-resolved measurements. Fast reconstructions are obtained using a diffusion approximation and Monte-Carlo simulations, parallelized in a multicore computer and a GPU respectively.