Patent Document ID: 20070276257
Application ID: 11381443
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. An imaging method for locating nodes in a mammal comprising: injecting the mammal with fluorescent material near the site of a malignancy obtaining a temporal transfer characteristic for each of a plurality of source-detector combinations by a method comprising causing a continuous wave optical source from the plurality of source-detector combinations to be modulated with a digital waveform for a predetermined amount of time to generate a modulated optical wave; directing the modulated optical wave at a position that represents an initial estimate for the location of a node causing the injected fluorescent material to fluoresce, detecting the fluorescence light using a photo-sensitive detector of the source-detector combination that generated the modulated optical wave; using digital electronics for sampling the detector output and performing a correlation of the detector output signal with the digital modulation waveform to produce the temporal transfer characteristic corresponding to the source-detector combination; storing the temporal transfer characteristics obtained from each of the plurality of the source-detector combinations in accessible memory; reconstructing an image of the underlying tissue volume based in part on the stored temporal transfer characteristics.