Reconstruction algorithm for diffuse optical tomography using x-ray CT anatomical information and application to bioluminescence tomography

Abstract

An algorithm to solve the diffuse optical tomography (DOT) problem is described which uses the anatomical information from x-ray CT images. These provide a priori information about the distribution of the optical properties hence reducing the number of variables and permitting a unique solution to the ill-posed problem. The light fluence rate at the boundary is written as a Taylor series expansion around an initial guess corresponding to an optically homogenous object. The second order approximation is considered and the derivatives are calculated by direct methods. These are used in an iterative algorithm to reconstruct the tissue optical properties. The reconstructed optical properties are then used for bioluminescence tomography where a minimization problem is formed based on the L1 norm objective function which uses normalized values for the light fluence rates and the corresponding Green's functions. Then an iterative minimization solution shrinks the permissible regions where the sources are allowed by selecting points with higher probability to contribute to the source distribution. Throughout this process the permissible region shrinks from the entire object to just a few points. The optimum reconstructed bioluminescence distributions are chosen to be the results of the iteration corresponding to the permissible region where the objective function has its global minimum. This provides efficient BLT reconstruction algorithms without the need for a priori information about the bioluminescence sources.