Performance Evaluation of <italic>a Priori</italic> Information on Reconstruction of Fluorescence Molecular Tomography

Abstract

Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) plays an important role in in vivo small animal imaging. However, due to the diffusive nature of photon propagation in biological tissues, FMT suffers from a low spatial resolution, which limits its capability of resolving the distribution of fluorescent biomarkers. In this paper, we investigate the effect of functional and structural a priori information on the accuracy of FMT reconstruction by a hybrid FMT and X-ray computed tomography imaging system. The results from numerical simulation and phantom experiments suggest that the fluorescence targets embedded in heterogeneous medium can be localized when structural a priori information is utilized to constrain the reconstruction process. In addition, both the functional and structural a priori information are essential for the recovery of fluorophore concentration.

Reconstruction for Limited-Projection Fluorescence Molecular Tomography Based on a Double-Mesh Strategy

“…A quantitative three-dimensional reconstruction of FMT can be implemented where the distribution of optical properties is obtained by diffusion optical tomography (DOT) [19]. Liu et al present further studies on the effect of functional and structural a priori information on the accuracy of FMT [20]. Feasible region could reduce the scale of matrix equation of the inverse problem significantly, and it is also helpful for improving the quality of final results [21–28].…”

Fast and Robust Reconstruction for Fluorescence Molecular Tomography viaL1-2Regularization

“…To alleviate the ill-posedness of FMT, some a priori information, such as anatomical information, optical properties, permissible region, and sparsity of target distribution, has been successfully incorporated in FMT reconstruction [4–7]. In addition, many regularization techniques have also been devoted to get an accurate and stable solution.…”