The effect and correction of reference heterogeneity in diffuse optical tomography

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Near infrared (NIR) diffuse optical tomography has demonstrated great potential in the initial diagnosis of tumor and in the assessment of tumor vasculature response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. To reconstruct the absorption map of a breast lesion, perturbation is needed which is the normalized difference between the measurements of lesion-side breast and contralateral reference breast. However, the heterogeneity in the reference breast can produce unwanted perturbation which will result in distortion of the reconstructed target absorption map. This report introduces a filtering method to overcome the reference heterogeneity. This method corrects affected source-detector measurements obtained from the reference side by using averages of unaffected measurements. As a result, the filtered perturbation has decreased the effect of heterogeneity on the reconstructed absorption maps. To evaluate the performance of this filtering method, we have compared the reconstructed results with and without the filtering algorithm using simulated heterogeneous reference with heterogeneous absorbers ranging from 0.05 to 0.20 cm -1 and heterogeneous scatters ranging from 10 to 20cm -1 . The results show that the algorithm can improve the maximum reconstructed target value up to 99% of the value with homogeneous reference. In the worst case of high absorption heterogeneity in reference breast, the maximum reconstructed value was around 30.85% of the true absorption without filtering correction and was improved to 60.4% of the true absorption value, which is 95% of the reconstructed value when using the homogeneous reference.