A novel approach for the time-domain fluorescence imaging of a semi-infinite turbid medium: Monte Carlo evaluation

Abstract

We investigated the feasibility of a two-step scheme for reconstruction of a fluorophore target embedded in a semi-infinite medium. In this scheme, we neglected the presence of the fluorophore target for the excitation light and used an analytical solution of the time-dependent radiative transfer equation (RTE) for the excitation light in a homogeneous semi-infinite media instead of solving the RTE numerically in the forward calculation. In the first step of this reconstruction scheme, we implemented a pixel-based reconstruction using the Landweber method with adjoint fields. The second step uses this result as an initial guess for solving the shape and contrast value reconstruction problem using the level set method. Numerical experiments using Monte Carlo data measurements, show that the proposed scheme provides reconstructions of shape, location and contrast value of the target with rather good accuracy. The computation times of the solution of the forward problem and the whole reconstruction process were reduced by about forty and fifteen percent, respectively.