Tomographic reconstruction of tissue chromophores using thermal wave imaging

摘要

We demonstrate application of a thermal wave imaging technique to determine the physical dimensions and position of laser-heated chromophores in tissue. We demonstrate that utilization of a periodically modulated laser source for thermal wave excitation and coherent detection applied to each pixel may be used to compute images of thermal wave amplitude and phase at the laser modulation frequency and significantly improve quality of recorded radiometric images. A theoretical analysis utilizes solution of the three-dimensional heat conduction equation to simulate thermal wave images of amplitude and phase. Effects of non-specific laser excitation on the recorded thermal wave images have been analyzed. Results of numerical simulations are compared to that obtained from tissue phantoms and in-vivo samples.