Alignment of sources and detectors on breast surface for noncontact diffuse correlation tomography of breast tumors

Noncontact diffuse correlation tomography (ncDCT) is an emerging technology for 3D imaging of deep tissue blood flow distribution without distorting hemodynamic properties. To adapt the ncDCT for imaging in vivo breast tumors, we designed a motorized ncDCT probe to scan over the breast surface. A computer-aided design (CAD)-based approach was proposed to create solid volume mesh from arbitrary breast surface obtained by a commercial 3D camera. The sources and detectors of ncDCT were aligned on the breast surface through ray tracing to mimic the ncDCT scanning with CAD software. The generated breast volume mesh along with the boundary data of ncDCT at the aligned source and detector pairs were used for finite-element-method-based flow image reconstruction. We evaluated the accuracy of source alignments on mannequin and human breasts; largest alignment errors were less than 10% in both tangential and radial directions of scanning. The impact of alignment errors (assigned 10%) on the tumor reconstruction was estimated using computer simulations. The deviations of simulated tumor location and blood flow contrast resulted from the alignment errors were 0.77 mm (less than the node distance of 1 mm) and 1%, respectively, which result in minor impact on flow image reconstruction. Finally, a case study on a human breast tumor was conducted and a tumor-to-normal flow contrast was reconstructed, demonstrating the feasibility of ncDCT in clinical application.