Image-guided near infrared spectroscopy using boundary element method: phantom validation

Image-guided near infrared spectroscopy (IG-NIRS) can provide high-resolution vascular, metabolic and molecular characterization of localized tissue volumes in-vivo. The approach for IG-NIRS uses hybrid systems where the spatial anatomical structure of tissue obtained from standard imaging modalities (such as MRI) is combined with tissue information from diffuse optical imaging spectroscopy. There is need to optimize these hybrid systems for large-scale clinical trials anticipated in the near future in order to evaluate the feasibility of this technology across a larger population. However, existing computational methods such as the finite element method mesh arbitrary image volumes, which inhibit automation, especially with large numbers of datasets. Circumventing this issue, a boundary element method (BEM) for IG-NIRS systems in 3-D is presented here using only surface rendering and discretization. The process of surface creation and meshing is faster, more reliable, and is easily generated automatically as compared to full volume meshing. The proposed method has been implemented here for multi-spectral non-invasive characterization of tissue. In phantom experiments, 3-D spectral BEM-based spectroscopy recovered the oxygen dissociation curve with mean error of 6.6% and tracked variation in total hemoglobin linearly.