IN VIVO TRANS-RECTAL ULTRASOUND-COUPLED NEAR-INFRARED OPTICAL TOMOGRAPHY OF INTACT NORMAL CANINE PROSTATE

This is the first tomography-presentation of the optical properties of a normal canine prostate, in vivo, in its native intact environment in the pelvic canal. The imaging was performed by trans-rectal near-infrared (NIR) optical tomography in steady-state measurement at 840 nm on three sagittal planes across the right lobe, middle-line, and left lobe, respectively, of the prostate gland. The NIR imaging planes were position-correlated with concurrently applied trans-rectal ultrasound, albeit there was no spatial prior employed in the NIR tomography reconstruction. The reconstructed peak absorption coefficients of the prostate on the three planes were 0.014, 0.012, and 0.014 mm-1. The peak reduced scattering coefficients were 5.28, 5.56, and 6.53 mm-1. The peak effective attenuation coefficients were 0.45, 0.43, and 0.50 mm-1. The absorption and effective attenuation coefficients were within the ranges predictable at 840 nm by literature values which clustered sparsely from 355 nm to 1064 nm, none of which were performed on a canine prostate with similar conditions. The effective attenuation coefficients of the gland were shown to be generally higher in the internal aspects than in the peripheral aspects, which is consistent with the previous findings that the urethral regions were statistically more attenuating than the capsular regions.