Abstract

A prerequisite for any new medical imaging technology is a faithful representation of internal biological structure with as little reliance on data manipulation or reconstruction algorithms as possible. “Direct” imaging techniques that use no computed reconstruction provide the most conservative information to doctors during diagnosis and present the smallest danger of visual data artifacts. This explains the heavy reliance by doctors on x-ray imaging, despite its use of ionizing radiation. A longstanding goal of biomedical imaging has been the search for an optical (nonionizing) imaging approach that has the directness of x-ray imaging.

© 2002 Optical Society of America