Anisotropy factor reconstruction as a new endogenous contrast for cancer diagnosis with optical tomography

In optical tomography, the reconstructions have only been limited to the absorption μa and scattering μs coefficients of biological tissues due to theoretical and computational limitations. In this study, The authors propose an efficient method to reconstruct, in 3D geometries, the anisotropy factor g of the Henyey-Greenstein phase function as a new optical contrast for cancer diagnosis. The light propagation in biological tissues is accurately modeled by the Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE) in the frequency domain. The adjoint method is used to efficiently compute the gradient of the objective function. A parallel implementation is carried out to reduce the computational times. The results show the robustness of the algorithm to reconstruct the g-factor for different contrast levels and for different initial guesses. The crosstalk problem between μs and g has been achieved with a reasonable quality which makes the new algorithm a candidate of choice to image this factor as new intrinsic contrast for optical imaging.