Single-scattering optical tomography: Simultaneous reconstruction of scattering and absorption

We report theory and numerical simulations that demonstrate the feasibility of simultaneous reconstruction of the three-dimensional scattering and absorption coefficients of a mesoscopic system using angularly resolved measurements of scattered light. Image reconstruction is based on the inversion of a generalized (broken ray) Radon transform relating the scattering and absorption coefficients of the medium to angularly resolved intensity measurements. Although the single-scattering approximation to the radiative transport equation (RTE) is used to devise the image reconstruction method, there is no assumption that only singly scattered light is measured. That is, no physical mechanism for separating single-scattered photons from the rest of the multiply-scattered light (e.g., time gating) is employed in the proposed experiments. Numerical examples of image reconstruction are obtained using samples of optical depth of up to 3.2. The forward data are obtained from numerical solution of the RTE, accounting for all orders of scattering.