Early‐photon reflectance fluorescence molecular tomography for small animal imaging: Mathematical model and numerical experiment

Abstract The paper presents an original approach to time‐domain reflectance fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) of small animals. It is based on the use of early arriving photons and state‐of‐the‐art compressed‐sensing‐like reconstruction algorithms and aims to improve the spatial resolution of fluorescent images. We deduce the fundamental equation that models the imaging operator and derive analytical representations for the sensitivity functions which are responsible for the reconstruction of the fluorophore absorption coefficient. The idea of fluorescence lifetime tomography with our approach is also discussed. We conduct a numerical experiment on 3D reconstruction of box phantoms with spherical fluorescent inclusions of small diameters. For modeling measurement data and constructing the sensitivity matrix we assume a virtual fluorescence tomograph with a scanning fiber probe that illuminates and collects light in reflectance geometry. It provides for large source‐receiver separations which correspond to the macroscopic regime. Two compressed‐sensing‐like reconstruction algorithms are used to solve the inverse problem. These are the algebraic reconstruction technique with total variation regularization and our modification of the fast iterative shrinkage‐thresholding algorithm. Results of our numerical experiment show that our approach is capable of achieving as good spatial resolution as 0.2 mm and even better at depths to 9 mm inclusive.