Bioluminescence tomography with optimized optical parameters

Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a rapidly developing new area of molecular imaging. The goal of BLT is to produce a quantitative reconstruction of a bioluminescent source distribution within a living mouse from bioluminescent signals measured on the body surface of the mouse. While in most BLT studies so far the optical parameters of the key anatomical regions are assumed known from the literature or diffuse optical tomography (DOT), these parameters cannot be very accurate in general. In this paper, we propose and study a new BLT approach that optimizes optical parameters when an underlying bioluminescent source distribution is reconstructed to match the measured data. We prove the solution existence and the convergence of numerical methods. Also, we present numerical results to illustrate the utility of our approach and evaluate its performance. (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)