Patent Document ID: 20100256496
Application ID: 11780200
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for medical imaging of an inclusion comprising: imaging a tissue volume with a probe comprising: an ultrasound transducer that is operative to provide an on-site estimation of inclusion size and location; a first emitter and a first detector; the first emitter having light of a wavelength of about 400 to about 900 nanometers; the first detector detecting light of a wavelength of about 400 to about 900 nanometers; a source circuit connected in operational communication to the emitter; a detector circuit connected in operational communication to the detector; and a central processing unit connected to the source circuit and the detector circuit; scanning the tissue volume with light having a wavelength of about 400 to about 900 nanometers; the tissue volume comprising a first layer and a second layer; segmenting the scanned tissue volume into an inclusion region comprising a plurality of first voxels and a background region comprising a plurality of second voxels; the volume of each second voxel being larger than the volume of each first voxel; identifying a tissue layer thickness and an approximate tilting angle between the tissue layer and the probe; estimating photon density: φ(r,ω)=f(μ a1 ,μ s1 ′,μ a2 ,μ s2 ′), where μ a1 , μ a2 , μ s1 ′, and μ s2 ′ are absorption and reduced scattering coefficients of first and second layers, respectively; wherein absorption coefficients have the subscript “a”, scattering coefficients have the subscript “s”, wherein the subscript “1” represents the first layer, the subscript “2” represents the second layer, and the superscript (′) stands for the reduced scattering coefficient; applying a conjugate gradient method to estimate fitted optical properties of the first layer and the second layer; minimizing a least-square objective function given as min∥φ(r,ω)−φ 0 (r,ω)∥ 2 ; wherein a forward Jacobian weight matrix Wij = [ ∂ φ ij ∂ μ aj , ∂ φ ij ∂ D j ] , that relates the photon density perturbation at detector i and imaging voxel j with absorption coefficient change Δμ aj and diffusion coefficient change ΔD j , is calculated by using the bulk optical properties simulated from the two-layer layer model and given in equation (1) as: [ W ij ] = [ ∂ φ 11 ∂ μ a 1 … ∂ φ 1 L ∂ μ aL ∂ φ 11 ∂ D 1 … ∂ φ 1 L ∂ D L ∂ φ 21 ∂ μ a 1 … ∂ φ 2 L ∂ μ aL ∂ φ 21 ∂ D 1 … ∂ φ 2 L ∂ D L ⋮ ⋱ ⋮ ⋮ ⋱ ⋮ ∂ φ M 1 ∂ μ a 1 … ∂ φ ML ∂ μ aL ∂ φ M 1 ∂ D 1 … ∂ φ ML ∂ D L ] , ( 1 ) where M is the total number of detector readings; L is the total number of imaging voxels and φ 0 (r,ω) is the photon density of the first layer.