A Hardware Design for Portable Continuous Wave Diffuse Optical Tomography

In recent years, the rapid development of diffuse optical tomography (DOT) technology has made possible many successful applications in the field of biomedicine, such as breast cancer detection and observation of oxygenated hemoglobin distribution in the brain. In this work, we build an inexpensive and portable real-time continuous wave near-infrared (CW-NIR) DOT system hardware suitable for use in system on a chip (SOC) applications. With greatly reduced system volume, the system can pave the way for practical developments in the clinical setting. The proposed system processes digitized biomedical signals acquired from a front-end sensor circuit, and can operate in either continuous or discontinuous mode according to user settings. Finally, we demonstrate the improvements in image reconstruction associated with the two-dimensional (2D) post-processing technique employed in the proposed system.