Influence from relative size and absorption contrast of inhomogeneity on NIR diffuse optical image reconstruction

Abstract

Near infrared (NIR) diffused optical tomography (DOT) is emerging as a potential tool of non-invasively diagnosing woman breast cancers, neonatal brain hypoxia, and other human organ diseases. The intensive and worldwide investigations in theory and experiment have revealed the possibility of NIR DOT in providing both anatomical and functional information of biological tissue simultaneously, which is important for distinguishing between healthy and diseased tissues, such as benign and malignant tumors. In this paper, our recent DOT experiments on human lower legs and forearms are presented using our time-resolved measuring system and image reconstruction algorithm based on the modified generalized pulse spectrum technique. It was found that the image quality in the experiments, including both the spatial resolution and the quantitativeness of the targets, was rather poor, and the interior blood vessels undisclosed in the absorption images. To clarify this issue, the influences of target contrast and size on the image reconstruction were investigated with simulated data. We have accordingly obtained the following observations: the quantitativeness of the reconstructed optical properties was prone to be spoiled by the small size ratio and high contrast of the interior targets (such as blood vessels) to the background, and the incompleteness of information embedded in the featured data-types, in addition to the experimental noise, evidently answers for the degradation of the spatial resolution and quantitativeness. It was shown in a further simulative investigation that the image quality could be substantially improved by making full use of the time-resolved data.