A novel approach for studies of multispectral bioluminescence tomography

Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a promising new area in biomedical imaging. The goal of BLT is to provide quantitative reconstruction of bioluminescent source distribution within a small animal from optical signals on the animal’s body surface. The multispectral version of BLT takes advantage of the measurement information in different spectrum bands. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the multispectral BLT. The new feature of the mathematical framework is to use numerical prediction results based on two related but distinct boundary value problems. This mathematical framework includes the conventional framework in the study of multispectral BLT. For the new framework introduced here, we establish the solution existence, uniqueness and continuous dependence on data, and characterize the This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 10871179 and the National Basic Research Programme of China under Grant No. 2008CB717806. R. Gong (B) Department of Mathematics, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] G. Wang Division of Biomedical Imaging, Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA e-mail: [email protected] X. Cheng Department of Mathematics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China e-mail: [email protected] W. Han Department of Mathematics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA e-mail: [email protected]