What is it about?

We propose a new approach to time-domain reflectance fluorescence molecular tomography for small animal imaging. It is based on the use early arriving diffuse photons and state-of-the-art compressed-sensing-like reconstruction algorithms and aims to improve the spatial resolution of fluorescent tomograms. We show via numerical experiment that our approach is capable of achieving as good spatial resolution as 0.2 mm at depths to 9 mm inclusive, and is quite competitive in this sense with mesoscopic fluorescence tomography.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The main idea is in the use of asymptotic approximation to the fluorescence source function. Such an approximation gives us an opportunity to solve the fluorescence molecular tomography inverse problem with respect to the fluorescence parameter distribution function of a simple form and then to separate the distributions of the fluorophore absorption coefficient and fluorescence lifetime in the time domain.

Perspectives

In the near future we plan to implement and test the method for the separate reconstruction of the spatial fluorophore absorption and fluorescence lifetime distributions we shortly described in the present paper. We also plan to implement and study a hybrid approach which will combine the methods of macroscopic and mesoscopic fluorescence tomography. Of special interest to us is to adapt our method to data from physical experiments.

Alexander Konovalov
Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Russian Federal Nuclear Center – Zababakhin All-Russia Research Institute of Technical Physics,” Snezhinsk, Russia

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Early‐photon reflectance fluorescence molecular tomography for small animal imaging: Mathematical model and numerical experiment, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, November 2020, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/cnm.3408.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page