Breast cancer imaging and stroke monitoring with diffuse optics

This talk is oriented towards functional diffuse optical imaging and spectroscopy of tissue. My focus will be on several recent studies. For our breast cancer research, I will summarize the tumor contrast results obtained in a pilot clinical investigation employing diffuse optical tomography (DOT). I will present first in-vivo fluorescence diffuse optical tomography (FDOT) of breast cancer [1]. I will describe the measurement of tumor blood flow and oxygenation of breast cancer during chemotherapy [2], I will present multi-modal measurements combining DOT with positron emission tomography (PET) [3], and I will summarize the findings of our primary ongoing clinical trial. Lastly, I will describe experiments to monitor stroke in human brain; these experiments probe cerebral blood flow and hemodynamic changes [4] in response to perturbations such as head-of-bed positioning.