Abstract

The present work will serve in a diffuse optical tomography (DOT) scanner that we are developing for small animal non-contact molecular imaging. We present a new method for deconvoluting time-domain signals for use in DOT. Time-domain signals represents reemitted light intensity as a function of time when the medium is excited by ultra-short laser pulses. Actually, each signal equals the convolution between the light propagation in the medium and the impulse response of the detection system, so-called the instrument response function (IRF). Moreover, Poisson noise present in the system has to be considered. Time-domain signals directly depend on the optical properties of a medium and so contain additional information (compared to continuous-wave signals) that should be exploited in reconstruction algorithms. As an advantage, our deconvolution method does not use a priori information about the signal. It is important to remove the IRF and noise from measured signals in order to keep only the true signal, which has a direct link to medium properties.

© 2009 OSA/SPIE