title: Micro-computed tomography-guided, non-equal voxel Monte Carlo method for reconstruction of fluorescence molecular tomography.
abstract: The study of dual-modality technology which combines microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) and fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) has become one of the main focuses in FMT. However, because of the diversity of the optical properties and irregular geometry for small animals, a reconstruction method that can effectively utilize the high-resolution structural information of micro-CT for tissue with arbitrary optical properties is still one of the most challenging problems in FMT. We develop a micro-CT-guided non-equal voxel Monte Carlo method for FMT reconstruction. With the guidance of micro-CT, precise voxel binning can be conducted on the irregular boundary or region of interest. A modified Laplacian regularization method is also proposed to accurately reconstruct the distribution of the fluorescent yield for non-equal space voxels. Simulations and phantom experiments show that this method not only effectively reduces the loss of high-resolution structural information of micro-CT in irregular boundaries and increases the accuracy of the FMT algorithm in both forward and inverse problems, but the method also has a small Jacobian matrix and a short reconstruction time. At last, we performed small animal imaging to validate our method.
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics-Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Guotao
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Quan
authors.forename: Kan
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xiaoquan
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Deng
authors.forename: Qingming
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Luo
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Gong
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008856:Microscopy, Fluorescence / Q000379:methods*; D057054:Molecular Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed / Q000379:methods*