Hybrid use of early and quasi-continuous wave photons in time-domain tomographic imaging for improved resolution and quantitative accuracy

Measurement of early-photons (EPs) from a pulsed laser source has been shown to improve imaging resolution versus continuous wave (CW) systems in diffuse optical tomography (DOT) and fluorescence mediated tomography (FMT). However, EP systems also have reduced noise performance versus CW systems since EP measurements require temporal rejection of large numbers of transmitted photons. In this work, we describe a ‘hybrid data set’ (HDS) image reconstruction approach, the goal of which was to produce a final image that retained the resolution and noise advantages of EP and CW data sets, respectively. Here, CW data was first reconstructed to produce a quantitatively accurate ‘initial guess’ intermediate image, and then this was refined with EP data to yield a higher resolution final image. We performed a series of studies with simulated data to test the resolution, quantitative accuracy and detection sensitivity of the approach. We showed that in principle it was possible to produce final images that retained the bulk of the resolution and quantitative accuracy of EP and CW images, respectively, but the HDS approach did not improve the instrument sensitivity compared to EP data alone.