title: Shape-based reconstruction of dynamic fluorescent yield with a level set method.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) is an optical imaging technique that reveals biological processes within small animals through non-invasively reconstructing the distributions of fluorescent agents. The primary problem in FMT with non-stationary fluorescent yield is the increase of the unknown parameters to be reconstructed. In this paper, a method is proposed to reconstruct dynamic fluorescent yield.
  
  
  METHODS
  A shape-based reconstruction method that recovers dynamic fluorescent yield with a level set method is proposed for FMT. To reduce the number of unknown parameters, a level set function is introduced to describe the shape of target and a small number of parameters are used to describe the fluorescent yields at different time points.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results of simulations and phantom experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can recover well the dynamic fluorescent yields, shapes and locations of the target.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The proposed method can handle the cases with non-stationary fluorescent yields and recover the fluorescent yields at each projection angle.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China. xuanxuan.zhang@hotmail.com.
authors.forename: Xuanxuan
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China. jocheung1988@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Jiulou
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China. deabj@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bai
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China. luo_jianwen@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.|Center for Biomedical Imaging Research, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China. luo_jianwen@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Jianwen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Luo
mesh_terms: D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D061848:Optical Imaging; D014054:Tomography