The goal of Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) is to reconstruct spatial maps of the optical properties of tissue from the measurements of transmitted light based on a forward model of the photon propagation. Due to diffuse nature of light photons, DOT image reconstruction is a challenging 3D problem with a relatively large number of unknowns and limited measurements. The general objective of the proposed project is to develop high resolution and fast DOT reconstruction algorithms by developing an optimization based iterative reconstruction scheme that is spatially adaptive given high resolution a priori anatomical information.
The specific objectives of this small exploratory grant are to 1) investigate adaptive multigrid/multiscale and domain decomposition methods for the diffuse optical image reconstruction problem and 2) evaluate, benchmark and optimize domain decomposition and adaptive multigrid image reconstruction algorithms for optical absorption tomography with simulated, experimental and in vivo clinical breast data collected by a novel hybrid MRI and time resolved optical imager.
The proposed method is expected to provide more accurate and high resolution reconstructions in less time, which would have a major impact on all aspects of clinical breast cancer management and has the potential to catalyze innovative advances in other medical imaging and multimodality imaging techniques.
