Ultrasound-modulated optical tomography for biomedical applications

Abstract

I experimentally studied ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, which holds the promise for biomedical diagnosis. I measured the degree of polarization of laser speckles generated by scattered light transmitted through turbid media, investigated three signal-detection schemes for extracting the intensity of the ultrasound-modulated light, carried out experiments to image thick biological-tissue samples, and studied two techniques providing resolution in the cross-sections containing the ultrasonic axis. The study of degree of polarization presented results important for the understanding of polarization phenomena in turbid media. I explored an optical-filtering based signal detection scheme, improved the parallel-lock-in speckle detection scheme and proposed a speckle-contrast detection scheme. With the speckle-contrast detection scheme, I successfully obtained images of biological-tissue samples up to 50 mm thick. Further I studied frequency-swept ultrasound-modulated optical tomography for sub-millimeter resolution imaging, and developed ultrasound-modulated optical computed tomography that was based on a back-projection image reconstruction method and obtained clear images of biological-tissue samples.