Systematic optimization of MRI guided near infrared diffuse optical spectroscopy in breast

A hybrid frequency domain (FD)-continuous wave (CW) MRI/NIRS system was validated in a clinical trial involving patients with at least ACR 4 radiologic findings in Xi'an, China. In this study, MRI guided nonlinear iterative reconstruction of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) images with limited phase data is investigated. In addition, a systematic optimization of the system hardware design has been conducted as well. We are able to get less than 3% variation in tumor contrast to the surrounding normal tissue, by reducing the number of FD detectors from 16 to 6, showing the potential of reducing the FD detectors. Furthermore, a lookup table of the scattering properties has been made by averaging four MRI-identified breast density groups. By using this look-up table for the patient with the noisy phase data, similar AUCs and p-values are achieved for differentiating the malignant from benign patients.