What is Optical Tomography Optical tomography, is centred around the simple idea that light passes through the body in small amounts, and emerges bearing clues about tissues through which it has passed. It involves the technique of using near infrared photons for imaging specific parts of the body to obtain information about tissue abnormalities, such as breast and brain tumours. Optical tomographic imaging is performed by obtaining a spatially resolved map of the optical properties within the part of the body under investigation. All these techniques are powerful and have great advantages, but they suffer from drawbacks which limit their use as continuous, non-invasive, portable and low cost medical monitors.
Light is nonionizing over many wavelengths and is known to function well as a medical probe.
In particular, red and infrared light pass relatively easily through such structures as the skull, brain and breast, and is well tolerated in large doses. It can, therefore, be used to quantify tissue properties. How does Optical Tomography work Getting near-infrared optical tomography to work, is a big challenge, for the associated mathematical problem is by its nature very difficult to model accurately. Imaging in x-ray, is a relatively straight forward matrix inversion, since the radiation is assumed to have travelled along the straight line between the source and detector. In optical tomography, information retrieved from highly scattered light poses a formidable problem.