Abstract
Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) has been a valuable optical molecular imaging technique to non-invasively depict the cellular and molecular processes in living animals with high sensitivity and specificity. Due to the inherent ill-posedness of BLT, a priori information of anatomical structure is usually incorporated into the reconstruction. The structural information is usually provided by computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In order to obtain better quantitative results, BLT reconstruction with heterogeneous tissues needs to segment the internal organs and discretize them into meshes with the finite element method (FEM). It is time-consuming and difficult to handle the segmentation and discretization problems. In this paper, we present a fast reconstruction method for BLT based on multi-atlas registration and adaptive voxel discretization to relieve the complicated data processing procedure involved in the hybrid BLT/CT system. A multi-atlas registration method is first adopted to estimate the internal organ distribution of the imaged animal. Then, the animal volume is adaptively discretized into hexahedral voxels, which are fed into FEM for the following BLT reconstruction. The proposed method is validated in both numerical simulation and an in vivo study. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can reconstruct the bioluminescence source efficiently with satisfactory accuracy.
Highlights
Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a non-invasive optical imaging technique used to depict the molecular, cellular and genetic processes in vivo [1,2,3]
The structural information provided by computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is often incorporated in a multimodal BLT system
The bioluminescent image is captured by a scientific charge coupled device (CCD) camera whose axial direction is vertical to the X-ray central projection direction
Summary
Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a non-invasive optical imaging technique used to depict the molecular, cellular and genetic processes in vivo [1,2,3]. Compared with other imaging techniques, BLT has the advantages of low cost, high sensitivity, and high specificity. The structural information provided by computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is often incorporated in a multimodal BLT system. The reconstruction of BLT based on the heterogeneous model with appropriate optical parameters provided more accurate results in localization and quantification than the homogeneous model [7]. Compared with MRI, the CT device has low cost and high resolution, many multimodal BLT systems use CT to provide the anatomic structure [12]
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