Sensing Through Tissues Using Diffuse Optical Imaging and Genetic Programming

Diffuse optical imaging (DOI) uses scattered light to non-invasively sense and image highly diffuse media, including biological tissues such as the breast and brain. Despite its clinical potential, widespread adoption remains limited because physical constraints, limited available datasets, and conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle with the strongly nonlinear, ill-posed inverse problem posed by multiple photon scattering. We introduce Diffuse optical Imaging using Genetic Programming (DI-GP), a physics-guided and fully interpretable genetic programming framework for DOI. Grounded in the diffusion equation, DI-GP evolves closed-form symbolic mappings that enable fast and accurate 2-D reconstructions in strongly scattering media. Unlike deep neural networks, Genetic Programming (GP) naturally produces symbolic expressions, explicit rules, and transparent computational pipelines-an increasingly important capability as regulatory and high-stakes domains (e.g., FDA/EMA, medical imaging regulation) demand explainable and auditable AI systems, and where training data are often scarce. DI-GP delivers substantially faster inference and improved qualitative and quantitative reconstruction performance compared to analytical baselines. We validate the approach in both simulations and tabletop experiments, recovering targets without prior knowledge of shape or location at depths exceeding ~25 transport mean-free paths. Additional experiments demonstrate centimeter-scale imaging in tissue-like media, highlighting the promise of DI-GP for non-invasive deep-tissue imaging and its potential as a foundation for practical DOI systems.