Depth-correction algorithm that improves optical quantification of large breast lesions imaged by diffuse optical tomography.

Optical quantification of large lesions imaged with diffuse optical tomography in reflection geometry is depth dependence due to the exponential decay of photon density waves. We introduce a depth-correction method that incorporates the target depth information provided by coregistered ultrasound. It is based on balancing the weight matrix, using the maximum singular values of the target layers in depth without changing the forward model. The performance of the method is evaluated using phantom targets and 10 clinical cases of larger malignant and benign lesions. The results for the homogenous targets demonstrate that the location error of the reconstructed maximum absorption coefficient is reduced to the range of the reconstruction mesh size for phantom targets. Furthermore, the uniformity of absorption distribution inside the lesions improve about two times and the median of the absorption increases from 60 to 85% of its maximum compared to no depth correction. In addition, nonhomogenous phantoms are characterized more accurately. Clinical examples show a similar trend as the phantom results and demonstrate the utility of the correction method for improving lesion quantification.