Diffuse Optical Tomography based on Simplified Spherical Harmonics Approximation

The use of higher order approximations to the Radiative transport equation, through simplified spherical harmonics expansion (SPN) in optical tomography are presented. At higher orders, the image reconstruction becomes highly under-determined due to the large increase in the number of unknowns which cannot be adequately recovered. However, reconstruction of diffuse parameters, namely optical absorption and reduced scatter have shown to be more accurate where only the sensitivity matrix used in the inverse problem is based on SPN method and image reconstruction is limited to these two diffuse parameters. 2010 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (100.3190) Inverse problems; (170.3660) Light propagation in tissues;