Compact ultrasound-guided diffuse optical tomography system for breast cancer imaging

Abstract

Near-infrared diffuse optical tomography (DOT) has demonstrated a great potential as an adjunct modality for differentiation of malignant and benign breast lesions and for monitoring treatment response in patients with locally advanced breast cancers. The path toward commercialization of DOT techniques depends upon the improvement of robustness and user-friendliness of this technique in hardware and software. In this study, we introduce our recently developed ultrasound-guided DOT system, which has been improved in system compactness, robustness, and user-friendliness by custom-designed electronics, automated data preprocessing, and implementation of a new two-step reconstruction algorithm. The system performance has been tested with several sets of solid and blood phantoms and the results show accuracy in reconstructed absorption coefficients as well as blood oxygen saturation. A clinical example of a breast cancer patient, who was undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy, is given to demonstrate the system performance.

Reducing image artifact in diffuse optical tomography by iterative perturbation correction based on multiwavelength measurements

“…US-guided DOT system is a frequency domain imaging system consisting of a hand-held DOT imaging probe with an US transducer located in the middle. 24 Four laser diodes with wavelengths 740, 780, 808, and 830 nm are sequentially switched by a and a optical switch to deliver light modulated at 140 MHz to each of the nine source positions on the probe. Fourteen parallel PMTs detect reflected light via light guides from the tissue.…”

Recent Developments in Instrumentation of Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Systems

“…For breast imaging applications and to overcome the spatial resolution challenge, several groups have studied the co-registration of FD-NIRS optical tomography with other high-resolution imaging modalities such as MRI, ultrasound, and mammography [81][82][83][84]. In this approach, high spatial resolution images are used to guide the optical functional imaging with high localization accuracy.…”

“…In the flat surface optical probe geometry illustrated in Figure 14b, the probe consists of 9 source locations and 14 PMT detectors. The NIR light is emitted by four laser diodes of wavelengths The ultrasound (US)-guided optical imaging approach was also investigated [76,84]. In this approach, the co-registration of the B-scan ultrasound images are utilized to improve the localization of breast tumor, while the optical imaging provides optical absorption information of the tumor vasculature.…”

Time-Gated Single-Photon Detection in Time-Domain Diffuse Optics: A Review

“…For example, DOT with a small ρ could permit the continuous and non-invasive monitoring of deep vessel permeability (even buried three or more cm in depth). On the other hand, if coupled to other techniques (e.g., ultrasound [139][140][141][142]), DOT could represent a powerful diagnostics tool for oncology thanks to the simultaneous information on position and size of a suspect lesion (using ultrasound technique) and the quantification of tissue constituents (given by DOT), potentially giving hints about the lesion malignancy.…”