Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) is an optical imaging modality that has various clinical applications. However, the spatial resolution and quantitative accuracy of DOT is poor due to strong photon scatting in biological tissue. Structural a priori information from another high spatial resolution imaging modality such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been demonstrated to significantly improve DOT accuracy. In addition, a contrast agent can be used to obtain differential absorption images of the lesion by using dynamic contrast enhanced DOT (DCE-DOT). This produces a relative absorption map that consists of subtracting a reconstructed baseline image from reconstructed images in which optical contrast is included. In this study, we investigated and compared different reconstruction methods and analysis approaches for regular endogenous DOT and DCE-DOT with and without MR anatomical a priori information for arbitrarily-shaped objects. Our phantom and animal studies have shown that superior image quality and higher accuracy can be achieved using DCE-DOT together with MR structural a priori information. Hence, implementation of a combined MRI-DOT system to image ICG enhancement can potentially be a promising tool for breast cancer imaging.

Insight into the vasculature of the tumor in small animals has the potential to impact many areas of cancer research. The heterogeneity of the vasculature of a tumor is directly related to tumor stage and disease progression. In this small scale animal study, we investigated the feasibility of differentiating tumors with different levels of vasculature heterogeneity in vivo using a previously developed hybrid magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffuse optical tomography (DOT) system for small animal imaging. Cross-sectional total hemoglobin concentration maps of 10 Fisher rats bearing R3230 breast tumors are reconstructed using multi-wavelength DOT measurements both with and without magnetic resonance (MR) structural a priori information. Simultaneously acquired MR structural images are used to guide and constrain the DOT reconstruction, while dynamic contrast-enhanced MR functional images are used as the gold standard to classify the vasculature of the tumor into two types: high versus low heterogeneity. These preliminary results show that the stand-alone DOT is unable to differentiate tumors with low and high vascular heterogeneity without structural a priori information provided by a high resolution imaging modality. The mean total hemoglobin concentrations comparing the vasculature of the tumors with low and high heterogeneity are significant (p-value 0.02) only when MR structural a priori information is utilized.