Linear method of fluorescent source reconstruction in a diffusion medium

Abstract

A new method is described for obtaining a 2D reconstruction of a fluorescent source distribution inside a diffusion medium from planar measurements of the emission light at the surface after excitation by a plane wave. Point sources are implanted at known locations of a rectangular phantom. The forward model of the photon transport is based on the diffusion approximation of the radiative transport equation (RTE) for homogeneous media. This can be described by a hierarchical system of two time-independent RTE's, one for the excitation plane wave originating from the external light source to the medium and another one for the fluorescence emission originating from the fluorophore marker to the detector. A linear inverse source problem was solved for image reconstruction. The applicability of the theoretical method is demonstrated in some representative working examples. For an optimization of the problem we used least squares minimization technique.