We have conducted experiments using a recently developed time resolved optical tomography system. Our experiments were performed in a cylindrical glass beaker of 6.4 cm diameter. In the phantom experiments, the optical parameters (ms=16 mm-1, g=0.955, ma=0.005 mm-1) were chosen to be within the normal ranges in human breast tissue. The embedded fluorescence objects were 1 mm diameter glass cells filled with 65 mM HITCI dye. All experiments used picosecond laser pulses as excitation and a streak camera system as detection. The average incident power on the sample is about 600 mW, and data collection time is 1 minute. Eight collection fibers were used to collect the fluorescence light and transmit it to the entrance slit of the streak camera. The streak camera was used as a both time- and spatial-resolved multichannel detector. The system resolution is about 10 ps. Currently, we are able to localize objects with accuracy of better than 1 mm, resolve multiple objects if separated by more than 4-5 mm, and detect embedded object at 10:1 contrast ratio with an accuracy about 1-2 mm. These results clearly demonstrate the potential of our approach in various clinical applications, such as breast tumor detection.
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