High performance imaging system for diffuse optical tomography and associated method of use

摘要

A high performance imaging system for diffuse optical tomography is disclosed. A dense grid utilizing sources, e.g., light emitting diodes (“LEDs”), that achieve high performance at high speed with a high dynamic range and low inter-channel crosstalk are complemented by a system of discrete, isolated receivers, e.g., avalanche photodiodes (“APDs”). The source channels have dedicated reconfigurable encoding control signals, and the detector channels have reconfigurable decoding, allowing maximum flexibility and optimal mixtures of frequency and time encoding and decoding. Each detector channel is analyzed by dedicated, isolated, high-bandwidth receiver circuitry so that no channel gain switching is necessary. The resulting improvements to DOT system performance, e.g., increased dynamic range and decreased crosstalk, enable higher density imaging arrays and provide significantly enhanced DOT image quality. A processor can be utilized to provide sophisticated three dimensional modeling as well as noise reduction.