Challenges of Zinc-Specific Transrectal Fluorescence Tomography to Detect Prostate Cancer

The project studied the challenges of trans-rectal FDOT of negative-contrast targets relating to zinc-specific fluorophore. 1. Algorithms to enable trans-rectal FDOT reconstruction are developed, and synthetic FDOT study are performed to assess how sensitive the trans-rectal fluorescence measurement is to a negative-contrast fluorescence target. 2. A novel geometric-sensitivity-difference method is introduced to improve target depth localization for trans-rectal fluorescence diffuse optical tomography. 3 A novel analytical approach has been developed to quantifying the diffuse photon propagation in an outward-imaging geometry that idealize transrectal optical imaging. 4 Numerical studies have demonstrated that and detecting a target of negative-contrast in the trans-rectal prostate-imaging geometry is especially challenging. 5 Experimental works are conducted to test the feasibility of TRUS-coupled FDOT of tissue phantoms containing target of positive or negative fluorescent contrast over the background. 6 A routine is developed to use sparsely 2D TRUS images to synthesize the 3D prostate profile to improve the image reconstruction.