Abstract
X-ray fluorescence computed tomography (XFCT) as a molecular imaging modality can simultaneously identify the localization and quantify the concentration of high-atomic-number contrast agents such as gold nanoparticles (GNPs). Commonly used benchtop pencil-beam XFCT, consisting of a polychromatic x-ray source and a single-pixel spectrometer, suffers from long scanning time and high imaging dose. Sparse-view strategy benefits XFCT to reduce both scanning time and imaging dose. Nevertheless, its reconstruction undergoes ill-posedness induced by the compressive sampling. To preserve consistent imaging quality for sparse-view XFCT, we proposed an iterative Bayesian algorithm based on L1-norm constraint, wherein the L1-norm regularization is included in the one-step-late expectation maximization (OSL-EM) algorithm with regularization parameter determined based on L-curve criteria. The proposed algorithm was verified by imaging a 3-cm-diameter water phantom with 4 inserts containing GNP solutions with concentrations of 0.02, 0.04, 0.08, and 0.16 wt.%, on an in-house-developed dual-modality transmission CT and XFCT system. Different numbers (i.e. 36, 18, 9, and 6) of projection views were used for XFCT reconstruction, to evaluate the performance of various reconstruction algorithms. L1-regularized EM algorithm demonstrated the consistent robustness to suppress background artifacts and localize low-concentration GNPs (0.02 wt.%) with submillimeter accuracy, when the number of projection views reduces from 36 to 9. Moreover, our method’s potential for small tumor spare-view XFCT imaging was validated on a mouse surgically implanted with a 6-mm GNP target.
Highlights
X-ray fluorescence computed tomography (XFCT) as a promising molecular imaging modality has attracted broad interests, with the recent emergence of various biomedical applications of high-Z metal (e.g. Gadolinium and Gold) nanoparticles (NPs) [1], [2]
Different numbers of projection views were used for XFCT reconstruction to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm
The size of dataset used for XFCT reconstruction reduced from 36 × 21 to 18 × 21, 9 × 21, and 6 × 21, which gradually increases the ill-posedness of the XFCT reconstruction inverse problem
Summary
X-ray fluorescence computed tomography (XFCT) as a promising molecular imaging modality has attracted broad interests, with the recent emergence of various biomedical applications of high-Z metal (e.g. Gadolinium and Gold) nanoparticles (NPs) [1], [2]. These NPs have been intensively investigated in nanomedicine as imaging agents, biosensor, drug carrier and therapeutic agents [3]. Benchtop systems implemented with polychromatic diagnostic x-ray sources have been proposed to improve the accessibility of in vivo XFCT imaging [8]–[14]. The cost of significantly long scanning time is the decreased XFCT imaging throughput, which will be a
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