Investigation of a diffuse optical tomography-assisted quantitative photoacoustic tomography in reflection geometry

In this paper, we report the experimental investigation of a novel fitting procedure which can detect and quantitatively characterize the optical contrasts of targets using diffuse optical tomography (DOT)-assisted photoacoustic tomography. The hybrid system combines a 64-channel photoacoustic system with a 9-source, 14-detector frequency-domain DOT system. A white probe was used to house the ultrasound transducer, the optical sources and detectors. The experiment was performed in the reflection mode which is more realistic to clinical applications. The fitting procedure included a complete photoacoustic forward model, which incorporated an analytical model of light transport and a model of acoustic propagation. Using the structural information from the PAT images and the background information from DOT measurements, the photoacoustic forward model was used to recover the target absorption coefficient quantitatively. Phantom absorbers, 1 cm in diameter, with absorption coefficients ranging from 0.08 to 0.28 cm^-1 were imaged at depths of up to 3.0 cm. The fitting results were at least 85% of their true values for both high and low contrast targets. Blood sample in a thin tube of radius 0.6 mm, that was simulating a blood vessel, was also imaged, and the reconstructed images and fitted absorption coefficients are presented. These results illustrate the promising application of this fitting procedure for tissue absorption coefficient characterization and consequently breast cancer diagnosis.