An integrated solution and analysis of bioluminescence tomography and diffuse optical tomography.

While diffuse optical tomography (DOT) has been studied for years, bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is emerging as a promising optical molecular imaging tool. These two modalities have different goals. DOT is for reconstruction of optical parameters of a medium such as a breast from surface measurements induced by external sources. BLT is for reconstruction of a bioluminescent source distribution in a medium such as a mouse from surface measurements induced by internal bioluminescent sources. However, an important pre-requisite for BLT reconstruction is the knowledge on the distribution of optical parameters within the medium, which is the output of DOT. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model integrating BLT and DOT at the fundamental level; that is, performing the two types of reconstructions simultaneously instead of doing them sequentially. The model is introduced through minimizing the difference between predicted quantities and boundary measurements, as well as incorporating regularization terms. Then, we show the solution existence, introduce numerical schemes and prove convergence of the numerical solution. We also present numerical results to illustrate the utility of our approach.