Abstract
Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a novel optical molecular imaging technique that advanced the conventional planar bioluminescence imaging (BLI) into a quantifiable three-dimensional (3D) approach in preclinical living animal studies in oncology. In order to solve the inverse problem and reconstruct tumor lesions inside animal body accurately, the prior structural information is commonly obtained from X-ray computed tomography (CT). This strategy requires a complicated hybrid imaging system, extensive post imaging analysis and involvement of ionizing radiation. Moreover, the overall robustness highly depends on the fusion accuracy between the optical and structural information. Here, we present a pure optical bioluminescence tomographic (POBT) system and a novel BLT workflow based on multi-view projection acquisition and 3D surface reconstruction. This method can reconstruct the 3D surface of an imaging subject based on a sparse set of planar white-light and bioluminescent images, so that the prior structural information can be offered for 3D tumor lesion reconstruction without the involvement of CT. The performance of this novel technique was evaluated through the comparison with a conventional dual-modality tomographic (DMT) system and a commercialized optical imaging system (IVIS Spectrum) using three breast cancer xenografts. The results revealed that the new technique offered comparable in vivo tomographic accuracy with the DMT system ([Formula: see text]) in much shorter data analysis time. It also offered significantly better accuracy comparing with the IVIS system ([Formula: see text]) without sacrificing too much time.
Highlights
Bioluminescence imaging (BLI) is a powerful tool used in biomedical cancer research.[1,2,3] it is known as a qualitative imaging technique as it can only provide planar information over threedimensional (3D) imaging subjects
The results demonstrated that the pure optical bioluminescence tomographic (POBT) technique provided promising tumor reconstruction accuracy with much easier hardware setup and much less data analysis time comparing with the reference techniques
To verify the performance of our POBT system with multi-view projection acquisition and 3D surface reconstruction, as well as the Split Bregman algorithm for fast bioluminescence tomography (BLT), we conducted in vivo experiments with multi-system comparisons
Summary
Bioluminescence imaging (BLI) is a powerful tool used in biomedical cancer research.[1,2,3] it is known as a qualitative imaging technique as it can only provide planar information over threedimensional (3D) imaging subjects. Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) has been able to provide the quantitative 3D bio-distribution of the bioluminescent photons inside intact living organisms,[4,5,6] and it attracted more attention in preclinical small animal studies in oncology.[7,8] Because of the photo scattering e®ect in tissues, the 3D tomographic reconstruction of BLI su®ers from the challenge of solving the ill-posed inverse problem.[9,10] A common method proposed to overcome this problem is utilizing prior morphological information of the imaging subject obtained from computed tomography (CT) to optimize the system matrix of BLT and minimize its ill-condition.[11] Our group has recently advanced this optical-CT dualmodality BLT technique in quantitative imaging of liver[9] and breast cancer[12] mouse models. This a®ects the performance of BLT fundamentally, regardless of the e®orts in improving the forward model or inverse reconstruction algorithms.[8,13]
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