Diffuse optical tomography of breast with non-specific contrast agent

An in-vivo investigation of breast cancer was performed using a diffuse continuous wave optical apparatus. The clinical set-up works in the near-infrared (NIR) spectral window with 16 sources and 16 detectors collecting the light in parallel. An extrinsic contrast agent injected in bolus was used to perform differential diffuse optical tomography (DOT). The first order Rytov perturbation model and the Kirchoff approximation to account for the boundaries in the numerical model were used to compute the forward model. The data was processed to retrieve the pharmokinetics of the dye uptake locally in the tumor. Results prove the usefulness of this approach to distinguish between tumor and healthy tissue.