A full-field and real-time 3D surface imaging augmented DOT system for in-vivo small animal studies

A crucial parameter in Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) is the construction of an accurate forward model, which greatly depends on tissue boundary. Since photon propagation is a three-dimensional volumetric problem, extraction and subsequent modeling of three-dimensional boundaries is essential. Original experimental demonstration of the feasibility of DOT to reconstruct absorbers, scatterers and fluorochromes used phantoms or tissues confined appropriately to conform to easily modeled geometries such as a slab or a cylinder. In later years several methods have been developed to model photon propagation through diffuse media with complex boundaries using numerical solutions of the diffusion or transport equation (finite elements or differences) or more recently analytical methods based on the tangent-plane method . While optical examinations performed simultaneously with anatomical imaging modalities such as MRI provide well-defined boundaries, very limited progress has been done so far in extracting full-field (360 degree) boundaries for in-vivo three-dimensional DOT stand-alone imaging. In this paper, we present a desktop multi-spectrum in-vivo 3D DOT system for small animal imaging. This system is augmented with Technest's full-field 3D cameras. The built system has the capability of acquiring 3D object surface profiles in real time and registering 3D boundary with diffuse tomography. Extensive experiments are performed on phantoms and small animals by our collaborators at the Center for Molecular Imaging Research (CMIR) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School. Data has shown successful reconstructed DOT data with improved accuracy.