Optical tomographic imaging of breast with time-domain detection: methodology and phantom validation

Near infrared diffusion optical tomography (DOT) is one of promising tools for breast tumor detection because of its noninvasiveness and potential portability. In this paper, we propose an image reconstruction method for time-domain breast diffuse optical tomography, which offers simultaneous recovery of the absorption and scattering coefficients. Under the panel-compression detection mode, we propose a forward model based on the finite-difference solution to the diffusion equation, and furthermore develop an inverse model within a framework of the Newton-Raphson linearization and the generalized pulse spectrum technique. The proposed methodology is validated by experiments on a specifically-designed solid slab phantom containing two deeply-located absorption and scattering contrasting cylinders, using our multi-channel time-correlated single-photon-counting system.