a vianney.piron@ensam.eu; phone: +33 (0)2 41 20 73 73 P423; fax: +33 (0)2 41 20 73 50 b jean-pierre.lhuillier@ensam.eu; phone: +33 (0)2 41 20 73 85;
ABSTRACTOptical methods allow investigating biological tissue noninvasively without ionizing radiations. Moreover, considering low absorption processes in the tissue in the near-infrared wavelengths range, biological tissue can be deeply investigated. In this field, we studied the resolution limits of the detection of one and two tumour-like heterogeneities embedded in the middle plane of a slab that mimics a breast enclosed between two transparent plates. We used the diffusion equation in order to model the photons propagation in such slab. It is solved in the time-domain by means of a finite element method. We computed time-resolved trans-illumination data based on lateral scan of the slab. The timedependent transmitted light, received at the opposite of the source, was transformed in the frequency-domain and the modulation and phase-shift of the signal are then obtained. The resulting phase-shift considering the embedded objects was analyzed versus the distance between the objects. Then, the resolution limits were estimated considering different modulation frequencies and a noise level. The overall combinations took into account a set of optical properties that mimics realistic optical properties for healthy breast tissue and tumours.