High resolution diffuse optical tomography using short range indirect subsurface imaging

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is an approach to recover subsurface structures beneath the skin by measuring light propagation beneath the surface. The method is based on optimizing the difference between the images collected and a forward model that accurately represents diffuse photon propagation within a heterogeneous scattering medium. However, to date, most works have used a few source-detector pairs and recover the medium at only a very low resolution. And increasing the resolution requires prohibitive computations/storage. In this work, we present a fast imaging and algorithm for high resolution diffuse optical tomography with a line imaging and illumination system. Key to our approach is a convolution approximation of the forward heterogeneous scattering model that can be inverted to produce deeper than ever before structured beneath the surface. We show that our proposed method can detect reasonably accurate boundaries and relative depth of heterogeneous structures up to a depth of 8 mm below highly scattering medium such as milk. This work can extend the potential of DOT to recover more intricate structures (vessels, tissue, tumors, etc.) beneath the skin for diagnosing many dermatological and cardio-vascular conditions.