Shape-based reconstruction of dynamic fluorescent yield with a level set method.

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.