A mathematical model and iterative inversion for fluorescent optical projection tomography

Abstract

Solving the fluorophore distribution in a tomographic setting has been difficult because of the lack of physically meaningful and computationally applicable propagation models. This study concentrates on the direct modelling of fluorescence signals in optical projection tomography (OPT), and on the corresponding inverse problem. The reconstruction problem is solved using emission projections corresponding to a series of rotational imaging positions of the sample. Similarly to the bright field OPT bearing resemblance with the transmission x-ray computed tomography, the fluorescent mode OPT is analogous to x-ray fluorescence tomography (XFCT). As an improved direct model for the fluorescent OPT, we derive a weighted Radon transform based on the XFCT literature. Moreover, we propose a simple and fast iteration scheme for the slice-wise reconstruction of the sample. The developed methods are applied in both numerical experiments and inversion of fluorescent OPT data from a zebrafish embryo. The results demonstrate the importance of propagation modelling and our analysis provides a flexible modelling framework for fluorescent OPT that can easily be modified to adapt to different imaging setups.