<title>Method and application for imaging breast cancer using a contrast agent</title>

Abstract

Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) in the Near Infrared Spectral window (NIR) offers new possibilities for medical imaging. And using DOT, Indocyanine green (ICG) is found to be a useful blood pooling contrast agent for optical tumor detection. Here we introduce our efforts on study of breast cancer image reconstruction using ICG as a contrast agent. To improve the signal-to-noise ratio, we developed an effective method to analyze and process the raw data acquired from a CWS (Continuous Wave Spectroscopy) system. Differential absorption images of breast cancers are reconstructed by using ART (Algebraic Reconstruction Technique) which uses the diffusion equation within the Rytov approximation. The experiment device is a combination of sixteen light sources (tungsten bulb) and sixteen light detectors (silicon photodiodes). These sources and detectors are located on a circular holder where the human breasts are placed, each other at equal distance (11 angle apart). It takes a few seconds to acquire data since one source is on, while all the detectors simultaneously detect the photons. So an image includes 16*16 data points. Results from clinical trial in Japan and China show that there is a high concentration of ICG in the location of a cancer, suggesting high blood volume pooling and the usefulness of ICG detecting optically breast cancers.