Simultaneous mapping of absorption and scattering coefficients from a three-dimensional model of time-resolved optical tomography.

A Newton-Raphson inversion algorithm has been extended for simultaneous absorption and scattering reconstruction of fully three-dimensional (3D) diffuse optical tomographic imaging from time-resolved measurements. The proposed algorithm is derived from the efficient computation of the Jacobian matrix of the forward model and uses either the algebraic reconstruction technique or truncated singular-value decomposition as the linear inversion tool. Its validation was examined with numerically simulated data from 3-D finite-element discretization models of tissuelike phantoms, with several combinations of geometric and optical properties, as well as two commonly used source-detector configurations. Our results show that the fully 3-D image reconstruction of an object can be achieved with reasonable quality when volumetric light propagation in tissues is considered, and temporal information from the measurements can be effectively employed. Also, we investigated the conditions under which 3-D issues could be approximately addressed with two-dimensional reconstruction algorithms and further demonstrated that these conditions are seldom predictable or attainable in practice. Thus the application of 3-D algorithms to realistic situations is necessary.