Enhanced diffuse optical tomographic reconstruction using concurrent ultrasound information.
Multimodal imaging is an active branch of research as it has the potential to improve common medical imaging techniques. Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is an example of a low resolution, functional imaging modality that typically has very low resolution due to the ill-posedness of its underlying inverse problem. Combining the functional information of DOT with a high resolution structural imaging modality has been studied widely. In particular, the combination of DOT with ultrasound (US) could serve as a useful tool for clinicians for the formulation of accurate diagnosis of breast lesions. In this paper, we propose a novel method for US-guided DOT reconstruction using a portable time-domain measurement system. B-mode US imaging is used to retrieve morphological information on the probed tissues by means of a semi-automatical segmentation procedure based on active contour fitting. A two-dimensional to three-dimensional extrapolation procedure, based on the concept of distance transform, is then applied to generate a three-dimensional edge-weighting prior for the regularization of DOT. The reconstruction procedure has been tested on experimental data obtained on specifically designed dual-modality silicon phantoms. Results show a substantial quantification improvement upon the application of the implemented technique. This article is part of the theme issue 'Synergistic tomographic image reconstruction: part 2'.
['Di Sciacca|G|G|', 'Di Sieno|L|L|', 'Farina|A|A|', 'Lanka|P|P|', 'Venturini|E|E|', 'Panizza|P|P|', 'Dalla Mora|A|A|', 'Pifferi|A|A|', 'Taroni|P|P|', 'Arridge|S R|SR|']
D000465:Algorithms D001943:Breast Neoplasms D005260:Female D005583:Fourier Analysis D006801:Humans D007089:Image Enhancement D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional D016014:Linear Models D064847:Multimodal Imaging D019047:Phantoms, Imaging D041622:Tomography, Optical D014463:Ultrasonography
optical ultrasound inverse problems