Errors induced by partial pathlength variations due to mammographic compression in dynamic diffuse optical breast imaging

Optical imaging methods have the potential to overcome many of the drawbacks posed by current breast imaging modalities. Previous studies have found that mammographic compression induces different hemodynamic effects in cancerous and healthy breast tissue. This effect could be exploited in continuous-wave near-infrared spectroscopic imaging (CW-NIRS) for fast and accurate breast cancer screening. The primary issue with this approach is that breast tissue (and the cancerous mass) is displaced during the compression process, potentially introducing a considerable amount of errors and noise into the NIRS measurements with the current simple models used in estimating blood volume (and/or oxy/deoxy Hb) concentrations. In this work, we examine how these errors change with signal depth with breast compression and investigate methods to correct these based on simulations and experiments.