[The theory and research of near-infrared optical tomography]

The fundamental theory and new research of near-infrared optical tomography (NIR OT) were introduced. NIR OT can offer the functional as well as structural information of tissue, so its applications have emerged in areas such as functional imaging of the brain, breast cancer detection, continue monitoring of the brain in babies and any other medical applications. The paper broadly divides the types of NIR OT instruments into three groups: continuous intensity, intensity-modulated and time-resolved instruments. The diffuse function of light propagation through tissue was given, and emphasized on the two distinct solutions to image reconstruction: linear methods based on inverse scattering theory and non-linear methods based on model fitting. Give some advanced work we can do in the future, concurrent NIR OT and other conventional anatomical imaging techniques, such as MRI, CT, research on the presence of anisotropies, contrast agent in NIR OT, three-dimensional image reconstruction. At last enumerate some of the fundamental difficulties involved in NIR OT, such as the intensity matching problem between simulated and experiment data, the boundary effect problem. Although these are often acknowledged, they remain largely unexplored.