A CT-analogous method for high-resolution fluorescence molecular tomography

In vivo biomedical imaging using near-infrared light must overcome the effects of highly light scattering, which limit the spatial resolution and affect image quality. The high-resolution, sensitive and quantitative fluorescence imaging tool is an urgent need for the applications in small-animal imaging and clinical cancer research. A CT-analogous method for fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) on small-animal-sized models is presented to improve the spatial resolution of FMT to a limit of several millimeters, depending on the size of the tissue region to be imaged. The method combines FMT physics with the filtered back-projection scheme for image reconstruction of the fan-beam computed tomography, based on the early-photon detection of time-resolved optical signals, and is suitable for two-dimensional (2D) imaging of small size biological models. By use of a normalized Born formulation for the inversion, the algorithm is validated using full time-resolved simulated data for 2D phantom that are generated from a hybrid finite-element and finite-time-difference photon diffusion modeling, and its superiority in the improvement of the spatial resolution is demonstrated by imaging different target-to-background contrast ratios.