A Learned SVD approach for Inverse Problem Regularization in Diffuse Optical Tomography

Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) is an emerging technology in medical imaging which employs near-infra-red light to estimate the distribution of optical coefficients in biological tissues for diagnostic purposes. The DOT approach involves the solution of a severely ill-posed inverse problem, for which regularization techniques are mandatory in order to achieve reasonable results. Traditionally, regularization techniques put a variance prior on the desired solution/gradient via regularization parameters, whose choice requires a fine tuning. In this work we explore deep learning techniques in a fully data-driven approach, able of reconstructing the generating signal (absorption coefficient) in an automated way. We base our approach on the so-called learned Singular Value Decomposition, which has been proposed for general inverse problems, and we tailor it to the DOT application. We test our approach on a 2D synthetic dataset, with increasing levels of noise on the measure.