Three-dimensional localization of in vivo bioluminescent source based on multispectral imaging

Abstract

Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a novel in vivo technique in small animal studies, which can reveal the molecular and cellular information at the whole-body small animal level. At present, there is an increasing interest in multispectral bioluminescence tomography, since multispectral data acquisition could improve the BLT performance significantly. In view to the ill-posedness of BLT problem, we develop an optimal permissible source region strategy to constrain the possible solution of the source by utilizing spectrum character of bioluminescent source. Then a linear system to link the measured data with the unknown light source variables is established by utilizing the optimal permissible region strategy based on adaptive finite element analysis. Furthermore, singular value decomposition analysis is used for data dimensionality reduction and improving computational efficiency in multispectral case. The reconstructed speed and stability benefit from adaptive finite element, the permissible region strategy and singular value decomposition. In the numerical simulation, the heterogeneous phantom experiment has been used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm with the Monte Carlo based synthetic data. The reconstruction results demonstrate the merits and potential of our methodology for localizing bioluminescent source.