Abstract
We present the design and comprehensive instrumental characterization of a time domain diffuse optical tomography (TD-DOT) platform based on wide-field illumination and wide-field hyperspectral time-resolved single-pixel detection for functional and molecular imaging in turbid media. The proposed platform combines two digital micro-mirror devices (DMDs) to generate structured light and a spectrally resolved multi-anode photomultiplier tube (PMT) detector in time domain for hyperspectral data acquisition over 16 wavelength channels based on the time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) technique. The design of the proposed platform is described in detail and its characteristics in spatial, temporal and spectral dimensions are calibrated and presented. The performance of the system is further validated through a phantom study where two absorbers in glass tubes with spectral contrast are mapped in a turbid medium of ~20 mm thickness. The method presented here offers the potential of accelerating the imaging process and improving reconstruction results in TD-DOT and thus facilitates its wide spread use in preclinical and clinical in vivo imaging scenarios.
Highlights
Optical imaging is a powerful non-invasive tool to retrieve the distributions of exogenous fluorophores and/or endogenous chromophores in biological tissues
The abundant temporal information offered by time-resolved systems enables differentiating tissue absorption and scattering with minimal cross-talk [11,12] and sparse sampling of fluorescence contrast with improved accuracy [13] compared to its continuous wave (CW) counterparts
A Quantized Low Spatial Frequency base (QLSF) was selected as it provided best tomography results and ease of implementation experimentally. This novel instrumental paradigm that enabled the acquisition of 4D data cube (x, y, t, λ) was validated in fluorescence time domain diffuse optical tomography (TD-diffuse optical tomography (DOT)) to resolve the relative concentrations of two dyes with lifetime and spectral contrast
Summary
Optical imaging is a powerful non-invasive tool to retrieve the distributions of exogenous fluorophores and/or endogenous chromophores in biological tissues. A Quantized Low Spatial Frequency base (QLSF) was selected as it provided best tomography results and ease of implementation experimentally This novel instrumental paradigm that enabled the acquisition of 4D data cube (x, y, t, λ) was validated in fluorescence TD-DOT to resolve the relative concentrations of two dyes with lifetime and spectral contrast. 2.3 Illumination module and detection module On the illumination side, the PK101 Pico projector used in Ref [17] is replaced with another DMD-based projector (D4110 with VIS S2 + optics module, Digital Light Innovations, TX) for better coupling efficiency and light intensity coding linearity (see Fig. 3(a) and (b)) This module is capable of generating wide-field illumination bases for DOT with a 1024 × 768 micro-mirror array (0.7” chip size, 13.68 μm pixel pitch). The platform performances are extensively reported in the spatial, temporal and spectral dimensions
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