Local fine representation of the fluorescence map on the standard mesh can be redundant in the sense that the reconstruction resolution is usually limited in such a severely ill-posed problem. Using global characteristic shape functions that can approximately capture the major structural information, we study fluorescence tomography with a new shape-guided representation based on some underlying mesh. Moreover, the proposed method can naturally enforce the prior coexistence of fluorescence yield and lifetime when fluorescence maps are formulated in complex sources. The simulation results suggest that, compared with standard pixel-wise representation, the shape-guided representation offers better localization of inclusions with improved quantitative accuracy, particularly in the case with inclusions of low fluorescence contrast, such as 2:1 inclusion-to-background ratio, and is more robust to the initial guess and the noise.

Date Published: 1 March 2011
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 7896, Optical Tomography and Spectroscopy of Tissue IX, 78960Y (1 March 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.885008

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7896:
Optical Tomography and Spectroscopy of Tissue IX
Bruce Jason Tromberg; Arjun G. Yodh; Mamoru Tamura; Eva Marie Sevick-Muraca; Robert R. Alfano, Editor(s)