title: Multi-atlas registration and adaptive hexahedral voxel discretization for fast bioluminescence tomography.
abstract: Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) has been a valuable optical molecular imaging technique to non-invasively depict the cellular and molecular processes in living animals with high sensitivity and specificity. Due to the inherent ill-posedness of BLT, a priori information of anatomical structure is usually incorporated into the reconstruction. The structural information is usually provided by computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In order to obtain better quantitative results, BLT reconstruction with heterogeneous tissues needs to segment the internal organs and discretize them into meshes with the finite element method (FEM). It is time-consuming and difficult to handle the segmentation and discretization problems. In this paper, we present a fast reconstruction method for BLT based on multi-atlas registration and adaptive voxel discretization to relieve the complicated data processing procedure involved in the hybrid BLT/CT system. A multi-atlas registration method is first adopted to estimate the internal organ distribution of the imaged animal. Then, the animal volume is adaptively discretized into hexahedral voxels, which are fed into FEM for the following BLT reconstruction. The proposed method is validated in both numerical simulation and an in vivo study. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can reconstruct the bioluminescence source efficiently with satisfactory accuracy.
authors.affiliation: Engineering Research Center of Molecular and Neuro Imaging of Ministry of Education and School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710071, China.
authors.forename: Shenghan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: Engineering Research Center of Molecular and Neuro Imaging of Ministry of Education and School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710071, China.
authors.forename: Haihong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Engineering Research Center of Molecular and Neuro Imaging of Ministry of Education and School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710071, China.
authors.forename: Gen
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Engineering Research Center of Molecular and Neuro Imaging of Ministry of Education and School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710071, China.
authors.forename: Xu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Cao
authors.affiliation: Engineering Research Center of Molecular and Neuro Imaging of Ministry of Education and School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710071, China.
authors.forename: Shouping
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Engineering Research Center of Molecular and Neuro Imaging of Ministry of Education and School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710071, China.
authors.forename: Xueli
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Engineering Research Center of Molecular and Neuro Imaging of Ministry of Education and School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710071, China.
authors.forename: Jimin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liang
keywords: (100.6950) Tomographic image processing; (170.3010) Image reconstruction techniques; (170.6280) Spectroscopy, fluorescence and luminescence; (170.6960) Tomography