Design of a Novel LD-Induced Hyper-Spectral Imager for Breast Cancer Diagnosis Based on VHT Grating

There are some technologies can be applied into the breast cancer diagnosis, i.e. ultrasonic imaging, X-mammography, CT imaging, OCT, and MRI. But some factors including spatial resolution, contrast and price-performance ratio (PPR) is limited in these technologies. So, a hybrid technology of breast cancer diagnosis, that is, hyper-spectral imaging is adopted in this paper, which is the combination of the spectroscopy with the imaging. And in this paper, the laser diode (LD)-induced hyper-spectral imager for breast cancer diagnosis instrument (BCDI) is designed. Meanwhile, a custom-built hyper-spectral imaging spectrometer (HSIS) is also designed. In this spectrometer, the novel volume holography transmissive (VHT) grating is used as the diffraction grating instead of the plane or concave grating. This grating decreases the stray-light of the splitting-light system, which will improve the efficiency and resolution of the system. Experimental result show that the wavelength resolution of the novel BCDI can reach 2nm and the light-passing efficiency is improved. Compared with the other instruments of breast cancer diagnosis, this BCDI has many advantages, such as, structure is more compact, processing speed is faster, PPR is higher and resolution and accuracy is higher, etc. Therefore, this BCDI has the potential value in the diagnosis of breast cancer.