Parametric estimation of 3D tubular structures for diffuse optical tomography

We explore the use of diffuse optical tomography (DOT) for the recovery of 3D tubular shapes representing vascular structures in breast tissue. Using a parametric level set method (PaLS) our method incorporates the connectedness of vascular structures in breast tissue to reconstruct shape and absorption values from severely limited data sets. The approach is based on a decomposition of the unknown structure into a series of two dimensional slices. Using a simplified physical model that ignores 3D effects of the complete structure, we develop a novel inter-slice regularization strategy to obtain global regularity. We report on simulated and experimental reconstructions using realistic optical contrasts where our method provides a more accurate estimate compared to an unregularized approach and a pixel based reconstruction.