Parallel-plate diffuse optical imaging in a tissue-like phantom through high signal-to-noise measurement

In this paper, a parallel-plate diffuse optical imaging has been proposed and developed with chaotic laser. To evaluate the ability of the diffuse optical imaging system, a series of tissue-like phantoms are used to quantify the absorption coefficient and size of small inclusions. The propagation of a chaotic laser in the tissue-like phantom is studied theoretically and experimentally based on diffusion equation, and the cross-correlation characteristics of the chaotic signal are analyzed by extracting the peak values of cross-correlation. Image reconstruction is achieved by the diffusion equation based on the Newton-Raphson nonlinear algorithm. The evaluation of reconstruction performance is carried out by the mean squared error and peak signal-to-noise ratio. The results verify the feasibility of diffuse optical imaging based on chaotic laser in tissue-like phantom and show its high signal-tonoise ratio and superior performance.