Phase Based Diffuse Optical Imaging

Motivation

This work aims to improve medical care, particularly cancer care, by developing advanced noninvasive imaging technology. Diffuse optical imaging is based on sending light into the tissue and measuring the diffuse reflectance at a certain source-detector separation. Using current techniques, the recovering of tissue optical properties such as absorption and scattering in a multi-layered tissue requires additional sets of optical components (source-detector pairs). This results in either a bulky acquisition setup or time-consuming measurements.

Solution

By considering a phased based measurement we can acquire the measurements needed for solving a multi-layer problem and recovering the optical properties without adding the additional optical components. Such measurements can be implemented by using two sources and varying the relative phase between them for every independent measurement.