Designing & Simulating a TD-UHD Micro-DOT System to Predict Image Resolution Improvement Upon Existing Systems

Brain activation imaging is an essential component of developing effective treatments for patients affected by neurological conditions. A biomedical imaging system that is currently being used to image brain activation is that of diffuse optical tomography (DOT). DOT, a biophotonic imaging system, has the unique ability to preserve naturalistic environments due to its lightweight structure, but fails at producing high-quality images.

To supplement this issue, ultra-high density (UHD) DOT and time-domain (TD) DOT systems have been created with the ability to improve the quality of brain activation images. Although components from both TD-DOT and UHD-DOT systems combined with the use of microtechnology would theoretically allow for a DOT system with optimized image quality, such a system has not yet been designed. Thus, a TD-UHD Micro-DOT was simulated for imaging metrics using NeuroDOT in order to determine whether or not the system’s predicted metrics improved upon current systems.

In this study, predicted mean full width at half maximum (FWHM) and localization error values of the hypothetical system were compared to existing values of high-density (HD) DOT and time-domain (TD) DOT systems to place the hypothetical system within the context of existing technology. It was found that the hypothetical system was predicted to possibly improve in areas of image resolution upon both HD-DOT and TD-DOT systems but was not predicted to improve upon the HD-DOT system in terms of localization error. These findings imply that the TD-UHD Micro-DOT system design must be improved in order to reduce localization error before it is built.