Wolfgang Bangerth, Amit Joshi
Nonlinear inversion for optical
tomography
Proceedings of the CT2008 — Tomography Confluence: An
International Conference on the Applications of Computerized
Tomography, Kanpur, India, February 2008.
P. Munshi (ed.),
American Institute of Physics, 2008.
Optical tomography is a recent addition to the available set of computerized
imaging methods available to characterize live or inanimate matter. It uses
light in the optical and near-infrared ranges and is thus particularly
suited to study samples that exhibit significant variation in their optical
properties in this wavelength range. This includes, for example, biological
tissues as well as some inhomogenous fluids of industrial interest. We will
focus here on the use of the method for biomedical imaging.
One of the advantages of optical tomography over many of the established
methods is that it is relatively fast, inexpensive, and does not use ionizing
radiation. The latter is particularly important when studying live tissue as
the near infrared radiation does not induce ionization. Another advantage is
that the variant of optical tomography described here, namely fluorescence
enhanced optical tomography, can be made molecularly targeted, i.e. it can
be used to determine the three-dimensional distribution of biochemical events of interest,
as long as they can be targeted by antibodies or other targeting moeties.
In contrast to most traditional imaging methods such as X-ray tomography,
optical tomography does not use a linear mapping from the desired
description of an object to the detected signal. Consequently, we can not
hope for explicit inversion formulas such as the inverse Radon transform,
and have to resort to numerical procedures for imaging. We will explain and
demonstrate such a procedure in this contribution.
Wolfgang Bangerth
Sun Mar 3 06:42:12 MST 2024