John F. Heanue,Joseph A. Heanue,Brian P. Wilfley,Augustus P. Lowell
申请号：
US11381443
公开号：
US08755866B2
申请日:
2006.05.03
申请国别(地区):
US
年份:
2014
代理人:
摘要：
A system and method for optical lymph node mapping. The system is useful for guiding sentinel lymph node biopsy surgeries. A contrast agent that includes a fluorescent dye is injected near the site of a malignancy. The contrast agent drains into the lymphatic system, collecting in a sentinel node or nodes. The system utilizes one or more low-power continuous-wave lasers or light-emitting diodes modulated with a digital code sequence to probe the tissue suspected of containing the sentinel node. When the light is incident near the sentinel node, it will excite fluorescence from the dye. A portion of the scattered fluorescent light is captured with one or more photo-detectors. A correlation of the photo-detector signal and the digital code sequence is calculated to produce an estimate of the distribution of flight times for photons traveling from a given source to a given detector. The flight time distributions are used along with the measured amplitudes to reconstruct a map of contrast agent location within the tissue.
