A comprehensive study of the use of temporal moments in time-resolved diffuse optical tomography: part II. Three-dimensional reconstructions.

This paper addresses the inverse problem of time-resolved (fluorescence) diffuse optical tomography from temporal moments of the measurements. A methodology that enables one to provide fairly comparable reconstructions is presented. The proposed reconstruction methodology is applied to infinite medium synthetic phantoms in the transmission geometry. Reconstructions are performed for moment orders increasing from 0 to 3. The reconstruction quality is shown to be increasing when higher moment orders are added. However, the value of the highest useful moments order strongly depends on the number of photons that can be acquired. In particular, it can be considered that the benefit of using higher order moments vanishes when fewer than 10(8) photons are detected. The evolution of the reconstruction quality with respect to the optical properties of the medium and fluorescence lifetime is also shown.