An endoscopic diffuse optical tomographic method based on the effective detection range.

Endoscopic diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is a new medical imaging modality with the potential applications in functional imaging of the internal organs. To cut down the measurement time and the computation burden of image reconstruction, in this paper, we developed the image reconstruction algorithm with the partial measurement in the effective detection range (EDR) of a tubular tissue and the corresponding endoscopic imaging system with a novel endoscopic probe for flexibly selecting the detection sites. For a typical inner size and optical properties of the cervix, it is found that EDR is less than half of the inner circumference. Comparing to the traditional method, the adoption of EDR results in a reduction of more than a factor of two in the time cost for a measurement cycle and for the total iteration reconstruction. Images reconstructed from the simulation data demonstrate that the proposed method achieves equivalent image quality to that obtained from the complete data set. The images reconstructed from the EDR measurements on cervix-like solid phantoms show that both the location and size of the targets are reconstructed correctly. The proposed method will be useful to the development of endoscopic DOT technologies for cancer detection in tubular organs including cervix.