PET/ CT Guided Time-Domain Diffuse Optical Tomography for Breast Cancer Imaging

摘要

Time-domain diffuse optical tomography (TD-DOT) is interested to many scholars due to its unique features such as richinformation in each measured pulse, elimination of cross-talk in the reconstruction, and no need for the measurementcalibration, although TD-DOT imaging system requires very expensive equipment. Usually, the generalized pulsespectrum technique (GPST) is applied to transform the real domain optical diffusion forward model into its Laplaciandomain. However, the application of TD-DOT has been limited by the low spatial resolution due to strong opticalscattering in tissues. In this study, we introduced the anatomical guidance from computed tomography (CT) and positronemission tomography (PET) into TD-DOT to improve the quality of the reconstructed TD-DOT images with the softprior method. Furthermore, we have investigated to maximize the utilization of the rich information contained in themeasured pulses by increasing the frequency number in the Laplacian transformation. To validate the proposed method,we have performed numerical simulation studies by using the CT/PET breast images of a breast cancer patient, in whichwe generated the breast mesh from CT images and obtained the breast tumor position and size from the PET images. Thesoft prior guidance based TD-DOT reconstruction was performed in the Laplacian domain. Our simulation resultsindicate that the spatial resolution and the accuracy of the reconstructed TD-DOT images have been improvedsubstantially after applying the anatomical guidance.