Time-domain diffuse optical tomography utilizing truncated Fourier series approximation

Abstract

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) uses near infrared light for in vivo imaging of spatially varying optical parameters in biological tissues. It is known that time-resolved measurements provide the richest information on soft tissues, among other measurement types in DOT such as steady-state and intensity-modulated measurements. Therefore, several integral-transform-based moments of the time-resolved DOT measurements have been considered to estimate spatially distributed optical parameters. However, the use of such moments can result in low-contrast images and cross-talks between the reconstructed optical parameters, limiting their accuracy. In this work, we propose to utilize a truncated Fourier series approximation in time-resolved DOT. Using this approximation, we obtained optical parameter estimates with accuracy comparable to using whole time-resolved data that uses low computational time and resources. The truncated Fourier series approximation based estimates also displayed good contrast and minimal parameter cross-talk, and the estimates further improved in accuracy when multiple Fourier frequencies were used.