Endoscopic diffuse optical tomography for esophagus: Initial investigation

Endoscopic diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is a novel approach that can be used in imaging the optical absorption and scattering contrast in the internal organs. In endoscopic DOT, the sources illuminate outward from the internal surface of the organs and the detectors collect the diffused light from the same surface. This new kind of imaging geometry requests modified forward and inverse model. A thin ring-shaped geometry is provided in this paper for solving the forward problem, and the reconstruction of the image is worked out by the NIRFAST package. The esophagus-like model is made to simulate the different scales of carcinoma occurred in the 2D transections. This research will verify the possibility of esophagus imaging using endoscopic DOT, and acquire the potential problems for the further study.