Bioluminescence tomography with structural and functional a priori information

Abstract

Multispectral bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is one of the seemingly promising approaches to recover 3D tomographic images of bioluminescence source distribution <i>in vivo</i>. In bioluminescence tomography, internal light source, such as luciferase is activated within a volume and multiple wavelength emission data from the internal bioluminescence sources is acquired for reconstruction. The underline non-uniqueness problem associated with non-spectrally resolved intensity-based bioluminescence tomography was demonstrated by Dehghani et al. and it also shown that using a spectrally resolved technique, an accurate solution for the source distribution can be calculated from the measured data if both functional and anatomical a priori information are at hand. Thus it is of great desire to develop an imaging system that is capable of simultaneously acquiring both the optical and structural <i>a priori</i> information as well as acquiring the bioluminescence data. In this paper we present our first combined optical tomography and CT system which constitutes with a cool CCD camera ( <i>perkin elmer</i> "cold blue"), laser launching units and Xray CT( <i>Dxray</i> proto-type). It is capable of acquiring non contact diffuse optical tomography (DOT) data which is used for functional <i>a priori</i>; X-ray CT images which yields the structure information; and BLT images. Physical phantom experiments are designed to verify the system accuracy, repeatability and resolution. These studies shows the feasibility of such imaging system and its potential.