Performance characteristics of a laser based planar imaging system

With the advent of lasers and high sensitivity detectors, there has been a recent renewed interest in medical imaging at visible wavelengths. This paper reports on the investigation of the spatial resolution of a prototype laser based planar imaging system by examining the transmission of the laser beam through a phantom medium having similar absorption and scattering properties to that of soft tissue. The results of this work, whilst supporting the conclusions of other recent publications, have demonstrated a previously unreported phenomenon. With the experimental configuration described in this paper, opaque objects, in the form of thin wires, are equally well resolved at similar distances from both the input and exit boundaries of the scattering medium. The spatial resolution is a maximum nearest these boundaries.