Frequency-domain optical tomographic image reconstruction algorithm with the simplified spherical harmonics (SP3) light propagation model

The forward results show that the FD-SP3 model approximates the FD-ERT (S12) solution within high accuracy; the average errors in the phase (<3.7%) and the amplitude (<7.1%) of the partial current at the boundary are reported. From the inverse results we find that the absorption and scattering coefficient maps are more accurately reconstructed with the SP3 model than those with the SP1 model. Therefore, this work shows that the FD-SP3 is an efficient model for optical tomographic imaging of small-volume media with non-diffuse properties both in terms of computational time and accuracy as it requires significantly lower CPU time than the FD-ERT (S12) and also it is more accurate than the FD-SP1.