Time-resolved diffuse optical tomography with patterned-light illumination and detection

This investigation explores the feasibility of performing diffuse optical tomography based on time-domain wide-field illumination and detection strategies. Wide-field patterned excitation and detection schemes are investigated in transmittance geometry with time-gated detection channels. A Monte Carlo forward model is employed to compute the time-resolved Jacobians for rigorous light propagation modeling. We demonstrate both in silico and experimentally that reconstructions of absorption structures based on wide-field patterned-light strategies are feasible and outperform classical point excitation schemes for similar data set sizes. Moreover, we demonstrate that time-domain information is retained even though large spatial areas are illuminated. The enhanced time-domain data set allows for quantitative three-dimensional imaging in thick tissue based on relatively small data sets associated with much shorter acquisition times. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America