Ultrafast contour imaging for time-domain diffuse optical tomography

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is well known to be ill-posed and suffers from a poor resolution. While time domain DOT can bolster the resolution by time-gating to extract weakly scattering photons, it is often confronted by an inferior signal to noise ratio and a low measurement density. This is particularly problematic for non-contact DOT imaging of non-planar objects, which faces an inherent tradeoff between the light collection efficiency and depth of field. We present here ultrafast contour imaging, a method that enables efficient light collection over curved surfaces with a dense spatiotemporal sampling of diffused light, allowing DOT imaging in the object’s native geometry with an improved resolution. We demonstrated our approach with both phantom and small animal imaging results. ?2020 Optical Society of America