A spatio-temporal reconstruction algorithm for diffuse optical tomography based on a hemodynamic response function model

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) can reconstruct localized changes in oxy- and deoxygenated hemoglobin concentrations in tissue, and is an effective technique for functional brain imaging. To recover the spatial distribution and temporal variation of changes evoked by brain activation, an inverse solution for a joint spatio-temporal reconstruction is proposed, in contrast to traditional methods which treat the problem independently at each time instant. We use a hemodynamic response function model patterned after fMRI. The DOT setting is more complicated than fMRI however, and we describe required extensions of this model. Simulation results show improvement in spatial resolution and contrast-to-noise ratio over traditional frame-by-frame reconstruction even after posterior fitting with same temporal prior