Integrated visualization of multi-angle bioluminescence imaging and micro CT

Abstract

This paper explores new methods to visualize and fuse multi-2D bioluminescence imaging (BLI) data with structural imaging modalities such as micro CT and MR. A geometric, back-projection-based 3D reconstruction for superficial lesions from multi-2D BLI data is presented, enabling a coarse estimate of the 3D source envelopes from the multi-2D BLI data. Also, an intuitive 3D landmark selection is developed to enable fast BLI / CT registration. Three modes of fused BLI / CT visualization were developed: slice visualization, carousel visualization and 3D surface visualization. The added value of the fused visualization is demonstrated in three small-animal experiments, where the sensitivity of BLI to detect cell clusters is combined with anatomical detail from micro-CT imaging.

Atlas-based whole-body segmentation of mice from low-contrast Micro-CT data

“…Therefore, BLI or FLI datasets are often combined (fused) with high-resolution diffuse light photographs and co-registered Micro-CT datasets. Although we earlier demonstrated that this improves visual data navigation (Kok et al, 2007), the localization of a particular structure of interest remains challenging if the structure of interest does not show sufficient contrast, for instance for abdominal organs in Micro-CT. An automated whole-body segmentation of the entire animal, including the skeleton, would therefore greatly facilitate data interpretation.…”

Towards integrated analysis of longitudinal whole-body small animal imaging studies

“…Figure 5 gives an example of multi-view BLI to CT registration; in addition the articulated atlas is fitted to the CT. This way, an integrated data exploration is achieved, where the lightsource outer envelope is coarsely approximated from the optical images for superficial lesions [20]. Anatomical context is provided by the fitted atlas.…”

Multimodal imaging and treatment of bone metastasis

“…We have demonstrated that in application related to metastatic bone disease, there is a clear benefit in combining 3D BLI with lCT. By integrating tomographic BLI data sets with lCT-images from the same animal, information about tumor location from the optical imaging with high resolution structural details on the skeleton for the lCT imaging could be acquired [72] (Fig. 3).…”