Transillumination Imaging of Tissue by Phase Modulation Techniques

Optical imaging through human tissue to determine interior structure and functional status has broad potential applications in many fields of medicine, just to name early cancer diagnosis of breast and scrotum or brain imaging. Images for medical diagnosis in these areas can be obtained using a number of existing techniques1. However, most of these techniques suffer from the fact that they are either invasive by utilizing ionizing radiation or they are implemented largely by non-portable, costly devices. Even more important, the images obtained by these methods almost exclusively reveal static, morphological information about the biological object, i.e. they give no indication about the functional status or the functional dynamics of the tissue under investigation.