Breast cancer affects women worldwide, with the highest incidence and fourth highest mortality rate among female tumors. Early detection and early treatment are crucial to the health. This breaking-through technology aims at designing and constructing a compliant prone-type ring-scanning inspection platform incorporated with a simultaneous multi-frequency driving near-infrared (NIR) light source to complete a diffuse optical imaging system. The realized system has two features superior to other counterpart imaging equipments: (i) compliant flexible optical channels to collect optical information, and (ii) simultaneous multiple frequency driving light source. It brings the benefits to improve the accuracy of reconstructed images and shorten examination time for test subjects.

Compared to the existing medical imaging modalities, NIR DOT is not invasive, radiation free and does not cause breast cancer. This technique has been developed for a compliant prone NIR DOT system. The design of compliant optical-channels scanning may prevent the data loss due to untouched scanning between optical channels and non-circular breast. For using simultaneous multiple-frequency driving light sources, this technology is able to obtain several times of light information from a single power source in a single measurement. This allows to shorten scanning time and better image quality for image reconstruction.

This technology realizes compliant optical-channel scanning and simultaneous multi-frequency driving light sources in a prone-type NIR DOT imaging equipment. The counterpart DOT systems developed in major medical imaging equipment companies such as GE, Philip, Siemens, etc. are all constructed with fixed move-in and move-out optical-channel design. Furthermore, sequential multiple frequency driving light sources are employed; thus, taking more time for examination. It is believed that after receiving positive verification results, the developed imaging equipment is potentially of great commercial value.