title: Incorporating MRI structural information into bioluminescence tomography: system, heterogeneous reconstruction and in vivo quantification.
abstract: Combining two or more imaging modalities to provide complementary information has become commonplace in clinical practice and in preclinical and basic biomedical research. By incorporating the structural information provided by computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the ill poseness nature of bioluminescence tomography (BLT) can be reduced significantly, thus improve the accuracies of reconstruction and in vivo quantification. In this paper, we present a small animal imaging system combining multi-view and multi-spectral BLT with MRI. The independent MRI-compatible optical device is placed at the end of the clinical MRI scanner. The small animal is transferred between the light tight chamber of the optical device and the animal coil of MRI via a guide rail during the experiment. After the optical imaging and MRI scanning procedures are finished, the optical images are mapped onto the MRI surface by interactive registration between boundary of optical images and silhouette of MRI. Then, incorporating the MRI structural information, a heterogeneous reconstruction algorithm based on finite element method (FEM) with L 1 normalization is used to reconstruct the position, power and region of the light source. In order to validate the feasibility of the system, we conducted experiments of nude mice model implanted with artificial light source and quantitative analysis of tumor inoculation model with MDA-231-GFP-luc. Preliminary results suggest the feasibility and effectiveness of the prototype system.
authors.affiliation: School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710071, China.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710071, China.
authors.forename: Duofang
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710071, China ; contributed equally.
authors.forename: Jimin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing 100730, China.
authors.forename: Huadan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing 100730, China.
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lei
authors.affiliation: Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing 100730, China.
authors.forename: Qin
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710071, China.
authors.forename: Dongmei
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing 100730, China.
authors.forename: Ming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Meng
authors.affiliation: Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing 100730, China ; jin_zhengyu@163.com ; contributed equally.
authors.forename: Zhengyu
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.affiliation: School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710071, China ; Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tian
keywords: (110.0110) Imaging systems; (110.6955) Tomographic imaging; (170.3880) Medical and biological imaging