Sensitivity analysis of imaging geometries for prostate diffuse optical tomography.

Endoscopic and interstitial diffuse optical tomography have been studied in clinical investigations for imaging prostate tissues, yet, there is no comprehensive comparison of how these two imaging geometries affect the quality of the reconstruction images. In this study, the effect of imaging geometry is investigated by comparing the cross-section of the Jacobian sensitivity matrix and reconstructed images for three-dimensional mathematical phantoms. Next, the effect of source-detector configurations and number of measurements in both geometries is evaluated using singular value analysis. The amount of information contained for each source-detector configuration and different number of measurements are compared. Further, the effect of different measurements strategies for 3D endoscopic and interstitial tomography is examined. The pros and cons of using the in-plane measurements and off-plane measurements are discussed. Results showed that the reconstruction in the interstitial geometry outperforms the endoscopic geometry when deeper anomalies are present. Eight sources 8 detectors and 6 sources 12 detectors are sufficient for 2D reconstruction with endoscopic and interstitial geometry respectively. For a 3D problem, the quantitative accuracy in the interstitial geometry is significantly improved using off-plane measurements but only slightly in the endoscopic geometry.