Diffuse optical tomography using the one-way radiative transfer equation.

We present a computational study of diffuse optical tomography using the one-way radiative transfer equation. The one-way radiative transfer is a simplification of the radiative transfer equation to approximate the transmission of light through tissues. The major simplification of this approximation is that the intensity satisfies an initial value problem rather than a boundary value problem. Consequently, the inverse problem to reconstruct the absorption and scattering coefficients from transmission measurements of scattered light is simplified. Using the initial value problem for the one-way radiative transfer equation to compute the forward model, we are able to quantitatively reconstruct the absorption and scattering coefficients efficiently and effectively for simple problems and obtain reasonable results for complicated problems.