Orthogonal Multi-frequency Fusion Based Image Reconstruction and
Diagnosis in Diffuse Optical Tomography
Abstract
Identifying breast cancer lesions with a portable diffuse optical
tomography (DOT) device improves early detection, while avoiding
otherwise unnecessarily invasive, ionizing, and expensive modalities
such as CT, as well as enabling first line of care treatment efficacy.
Critical to this capability is not just identification of lesions, but
rather the complex problem of discriminating between malignant and
benign lesions. To accurately capture the highly heterogeneous tissue of
a cancer lesion embedded in healthy breast tissue with non-invasive DOT,
multiple frequencies can be combined to optimize signal penetration and
reduce sensitivity to noise. However, these frequency responses can
overlap, capture common information, and correlate, potentially
confounding reconstruction and downstream end tasks. We show that an
orthogonal fusion loss of multi-frequency DOT can improve
reconstruction. More importantly, the orthogonal fusion leads to more
accurate end-to-end identification of malignant versus benign lesions,
illustrating its regularization properties on the multi-frequency input
space. With the line-of-care deployment of portable DOT probes requiring
a severely constrained computational budget, we show that our
raw-to-task model, for direct prediction of end task from signal,
significantly reduces computational complexity without sacrificing
accuracy, enabling lower latency and higher, real-time throughput in
medical settings.