Digital micromirror applied to laminar optical tomography

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Recent progress and increased commercial offerings for diffuse optical and molecular imaging for small animals has provided significant benefits to the molecular biology community. Endogenous contrast of blood has been used to image neuronal activation and vascular compartments. For example intrinsic imaging (reflectometry) can be used to monitor neuronal activation at the surface of the open cortex (100-400 µm depth) with high image resolution (10 µm plane resolution). Fibre based systems can image deeper structures at the price of spatial resolution due to the diffuse nature of light propagation and the discrete number of measurements taken when compared to a camera. Moreover present techniques lack quantification due to the heterogeneous absorption and scattering properties of tissues.The present proposal aims to resolve some of these issues by developing a new fast imager based on digital micro-mirrors optimized for spatial resolution up to depths reaching 8mm. The idea follows on recent work done on 3D Laminar Optical Tomography (LOD) where a high density combination of illumination and detection positions were used to scan tissues at high speed in combination with diffuse optical tomography to recover images at higher resolution. Here we propose to further this work by using digital micro-mirrors to generate specific patterns of light and detection to further the image reconstruction.