Imaging

Abstract | Diffuse optical imaging is an emerging technology in the field of non-invasive breast cancer imaging and functional brain mapping. A review of the various imagers developed to date for breast cancer is described. These imagers can be broadly classified into bed-based, parallel plate, and hand-held. With hand-held optical imagers, work to date has been focused on 2D reflectance-based spectroscopic imaging of breast tumors. A hand-held optical imager capable of reflectance and transillumination imaging has been developed at the Optical Imaging Laboratory to allow deep target detection. Experiments have been performed on tissue phan-toms that demonstrated detection of 5 cm deep targets via transillumina-tion imaging, compared to 2.5 cm deep targets via reflectance imaging. Multiple targets were resolved from 2D experimental studies, when placed 1.5 cm apart even at target depths of 2 cm. Preliminary in vivo studies on breast tissues demonstrated that pressure placed a significant role in detecting the target regions during 2D reflectance imaging studies. The ongoing research efforts focus on demonstrating the 3D tomographic imaging capability of the hand-held imager for volumetric tumor localiza-tion in any breast volume and curvature