Hierarchical Bayesian algorithm for diffuse optical tomography

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) poses a typical ill-posed inverse problem with limited number of measurements and inherently low spatial resolution. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical Bayesian approach to improve spatial resolution and quantitative accuracy by using a priori information provided by a secondary high resolution anatomical imaging modality, such as magnetic resonance (MR) or X-ray. The proposed hierarchical Bayesian approach allows incorporation of partial a priori knowledge about the noise and unknown optical image models, thereby capturing the function-anatomy correlation effectively. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed method avoids undesirable bias towards anatomical prior information and leads to significantly improved spatial resolution and quantitative accuracy