Critical computational aspects of near infrared circular tomographic imaging: Analysis of measurement number, mesh resolution and reconstruction basis.

The image resolution and contrast in Near-Infrared (NIR) tomographic image reconstruction are affected by parameters such as the number of boundary measurements, the mesh resolution in the forward calculation and the reconstruction basis. Increasing the number of measurements tends to make the sensitivity of the domain more uniform reducing the hypersensitivity at the boundary. Using singular-value decomposition (SVD) and reconstructed images, it is shown that the numbers of 16 or 24 fibers are sufficient for imaging the 2D circular domain for the case of 1% noise in the data. The number of useful singular values increases as the logarithm of the number of measurements. For this 2D reconstruction problem, given a computational limit of 10 sec per iteration, leads to choice of forward mesh with 1785 nodes and reconstruction basis of 30x30 elements. In a three-dimensional (3D) NIR imaging problem, using a single plane of data can provide useful images if the anomaly to be reconstructed is within the measurement plane. However, if the location of the anomaly is not known, 3D data collection strategies are very important. Further the quantitative accuracy of the reconstructed anomaly increased approximately from 15% to 89% as the anomaly is moved from the centre to boundary, respectively. The data supports the exclusion of out of plane measurements may be valid for 3D NIR imaging.