Liu Kai, Lu Yujie, Tian Jie, Qin Chenghu, Yang Xin, Zhu Shouping, Yang Xiang, Gao Quansheng, Han Dong
Medical Image Processing Group, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
Opt Express. 2010 Sep 27;18(20):20988-1002. doi: 10.1364/OE.18.020988.
In vivo bioluminescence imaging (BLI) has played a more and more important role in biomedical research of small animals. Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) further translates the BLI optical information into three-dimensional bioluminescent source distribution, which could greatly facilitate applications in related studies. Although the diffusion approximation (DA) is one of the most widely-used forward models, higher-order approximations are still needed for in vivo small animal imaging. In this work, as a relatively accurate and higher-order approximation theory, the performance of the simplified spherical harmonics approximation (SPN) in BLT is evaluated detailedly in heterogeneous small animals. In the numerical validations, the SPN based results demonstrate better imaging quality compared with diffusion approximation heterogeneously under various source locations over wide optical domain. Although the evaluation for the effects of the optical property mismatch indicates the sensitivity of SPN is similar with DA model in the source localization, it may offer improved performance with much less artifacts. In what follows, heterogeneous experimental BLT reconstructions using in vivo mouse further evaluate the capability of the higher-order method for practical biomedical applications.
体内生物发光成像（BLI）在小动物生物医学研究中发挥着越来越重要的作用。生物发光断层扫描（BLT）进一步将BLI光学信息转化为三维生物发光源分布，这极大地促进了相关研究中的应用。尽管扩散近似（DA）是应用最广泛的正向模型之一，但体内小动物成像仍需要高阶近似。在这项工作中，作为一种相对准确的高阶近似理论，在异质小动物中详细评估了简化球谐近似（SPN）在BLT中的性能。在数值验证中，基于SPN的结果表明，在宽光学域内各种源位置下，与异质扩散近似相比，成像质量更好。尽管对光学特性失配影响的评估表明，在源定位方面，SPN的灵敏度与DA模型相似，但它可能以更少的伪影提供更好的性能。接下来，使用体内小鼠进行的异质实验BLT重建进一步评估了这种高阶方法在实际生物医学应用中的能力。
