In vivo 783-channel diffuse reflectance imaging system and its application

Abstract

A fiber-based reflectance imaging system was constructed to produce in vivo absorption spectroscopic images of biological tissues with diffuse light in the ew domain. The principal part of this system is the 783-channel fiber probe, composed of 253 illumination fibers and 530 detection fibers distributed in a 20 X 20 mm square region. During illumination with the 253 illumination fibers, diffuse reflected lights are collected by the 530 detection fibers and recorded simultaneously as an image with an electron multiplying CCD camera for fast data acquisition. After signal acquisition, a diffuse reflectance image was reconstructed by applying the spectral normalization method we devised. To test the applicability of the spectral normalization, we conducted two phantom experiments with chicken breast tissue and white Delrin resin by using animal blood as an optical inhomogeneity. In the Delrin phantom experiment, we present images produced by two methods, spectral normalization and reference signal normalization, along with a comparison of the two. To show the feasibility of our system for biomedical applications, we took images of a human vein in vivo with the spectral normalization method.