An efficient forward model based on the Lattice Boltzmann method for optical tomography

Abstract

Optical tomography is a powerful tool for preclinical and clinical biomedical research, which enables quantitative observation and precise localization of regions of interest within biological tissues. However, the excessive time caused by the forward model of optical tomography is the main limitation of its application in many fields, such as the dynamic imaging. In this paper, we present an efficient forward model based on the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), which is realized by radiation transfer equation discretization to simplify the mathematical structures and apply it for optical tomography. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model for optical tomography, we carried out numerical cylinder simulation to validate the simulated light source distribution. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model for optical tomography, we performed a numerical phantom and a physical phantom experiments on a hybrid fluorescence diffuse optical tomography/X-CT imaging system to observe the tomographic reconstruction, by using the simulated phantom data and the experimental phantom data, respectively. The results showed that our proposed forward model obtained similar light source distribution comparing with the standard Monte Carlo method and the cosine similarity was about 96%. Further, our proposed forward model greatly improves the efficiency of optical tomography without a degradation of quality. The LBM provided about 5 times speed enhancement for phantom experiment and 2 times contrast-to-noise ratio boost for physical phantom experiment. Experimental results showed that our proposed model has large potential for performance improvement in optical tomography.