title: Linear method of fluorescent source reconstruction in a diffusion medium.
abstract: A new method is described for obtaining a 2D reconstruction of a fluorescent source distribution inside a diffusion medium from planar measurements of the emission light at the surface after excitation by a plane wave. Point sources are implanted at known locations of a rectangular phantom. The forward model of the photon transport is based on the diffusion approximation of the radiative transport equation (RTE) for homogeneous media. This can be described by a hierarchical system of two time-independent RTE's, one for the excitation plane wave originating from the external light source to the medium and another one for the fluorescence emission originating from the fluorophore marker to the detector. A linear inverse source problem was solved for image reconstruction. The applicability of the theoretical method is demonstrated in some representative working examples. For an optimization of the problem we used least squares minimization technique.
authors.affiliation: Medical Optics at the Institute of Medical Physics, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Henkestrasse 91, D-91052 Erlangen. edgar.janunts@imp.uni-erlangen.de
authors.forename: Edgar
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Janunts
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Pöschinger
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Brünner
authors.forename: Achim
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Langenbucher
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005453:Fluorescence; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D011827:Radiation; D012542:Scattering, Radiation