Characterization of tissue optical properties for prostate PDT using interstitial diffuse optical tomography.

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is an important treatment modality for localized diseases such as prostate cancer. In prostate PDT, light distribution is an important factor because it is directly related to treatment efficacy. During PDT, light distribution is determined by tissue optical property distributions (or heterogeneity). In this study, an interstitial diffuse optical tomography (iDOT) method was used to characterize optical properties in tissues. Optical properties (absorption and reduced scattering coefficients) of the prostate gland were reconstructed by solving the inverse problem using an adjoint model based on diffusion equation using a modified matlab public user code NIRFAST. In the modified NIRFAST method, linear sources were modeled for the reconstruction. Cross talking between absorption coefficients and reduced scattering coefficients were studied to have minimal effect, and a constrained optical property method (set either absorption coefficient or reduced scattering coefficient to be homogeneous) is also studied. A prostate phantom with optical anomalies was used to verify the iDOT method. The reconstructed results were compared with the known optical properties, and the spatial distribution of optical properties for this phantom was successfully reconstructed.