New approaches to higher resolution imaging in diffuse optical tomography

The method of Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) represents a technique of growing interest in the field of non-invasive biologic imaging. Traditionally, this has only been considered a three-dimensional imaging problem. As a result, a finite number of image pixels must be distributed over an entire volume, decreasing the available image resolution. In this work we introduce ideas for selectively imaging a particular region, a “slice” of an overall volume, thereby increasing the resolution in that subspace. While a general formula for the exact solution to an image reconstruction remains possible only for the description of the entire volume, we demonstrate an empiric approach which can lead to resolution of detail superior to that of the traditional method. In addition, a quantitative and general consideration is given to optical source and detector placement. The idea of how to optimally configure these experimental components is addressed, for the slice problem as well as the standard three-dimensional model. Definitions and algorithms are described which lead to surprising results that are not considered in the literature