Phantom based point by point photon counting and imaging of human skin tissue

Abstract

Time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) is popular in the resolved techniques due to its prominent performance such as ultra-high time resolution and ultra-high sensitivity. This paper presents advance signal processing techniques on the optical TCSPC signals obtained from the series of experiments on fabricated tissue like phantom. A pulsed laser sources at a wavelength of 830 rim transmits the light through the surface of phantom and finally at receiver side, photon counting device generates the histogram of the receiving signal. The noisy data obtained from the photon counter is processed with the splitting based denoising method. The method divide the signal into different subsets based on the transitions. Each subset is then processed individually and final merging of all subsets gives noise free signal. The main objective of this work is to analyze the signal obtained from photon counter in context of skin blood absorption. We had examined the signal obtained by varying the distance between transmitter and receiver to extract the features. Experimental results with our prototype shows more scattering with the increase in the distance at 3dB level and hence less absorption with increase in the distance.