Deep learning-based method to accurately estimate breast tissue optical properties in the presence of the chest wall

Significance: In general, image reconstruction methods used in diffuse optical tomography (DOT) are based on diffusion approximation, and they consider the breast tissue as a homogenous, semi-infinite medium. However, the semi-infinite medium assumption used in DOT reconstruction is not valid when the chest wall is underneath the breast tissue. Aim: We aim to reduce the chest wall's effect on the estimated average optical properties of breast tissue and obtain accurate forward model for DOT reconstruction. Approach: We propose a deep learning-based neural network approach where a convolution neural network (CNN) is trained to simultaneously obtain accurate optical property values for both the breast tissue and the chest wall. Results: The CNN model shows great promise in reducing errors in estimating the optical properties of the breast tissue in the presence of a shallow chest wall. For patient data, the CNN model predicted the breast tissue optical absorption coefficient, which was independent of chest wall depth. Conclusions: Our proposed method can be readily used in DOT and diffuse spectroscopy measurements to improve the accuracy of estimated tissue optical properties.