Adaptive extraction of permissible source region based on matched filtering for bioluminescence tomography

Abstract

Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a promising optical imaging tool broadly used in preclinical research to observe and quantify the distribution of bioluminescent markers in small animal models. However, due to the highly scattering property of the biological tissues and the limited surface measurements, fast and precise reconstruction in BLT remains a challenging problem. Permissible source region is a cost-effective strategy to partially solve the problem. In this paper, we present a matched filtering based strategy to extract the permissible region (PSR) adaptively for bioluminescence tomography. First, a digital matched filter is formulated according to the forward weight matrix, then the surface measurements are filtered and the permissible source region is extracted according to the first several biggest outputs of the matched filter larger than a threshold value, and finally the bioluminescent source in the permissible source region is recovered. Numerical simulation experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that the number of unknowns can be significantly reduced even using a small threshold value and the BLT reconstruction quality can be improved with appropriate PSR.