Zhou Yuan, Guang Huizhi, Pu Huangsheng, Zhang Jiulou, Luo Jianwen
Appl Opt. 2016 Jun 20;55(18):4843-9. doi: 10.1364/AO.55.004843.
Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) can visualize biological activities at cellular and molecular levels in vivo, and has been extensively used in drug delivery and tumor detection research of small animals. The ill-posedness of the FMT inverse problem makes it difficult to reconstruct and unmix multiple adjacent fluorescent targets that have different functional features but are labeled with the same fluorochrome. A method based on independent component analysis for multispectral excited FMT was proposed in our previous study. It showed that double fluorescent targets with certain edge-to-edge distance (EED) could be unmixed by the method. In this study, the situation is promoted to unmix multiple adjacent fluorescent targets (i.e., more than two fluorescent targets and EED=0). Phantom experiments on the resolving ability of the proposed algorithm demonstrate that the algorithm performs well in unmixing multiple adjacent fluorescent targets in both lateral and axial directions. And also, we recovered the locational information of each independent fluorescent target and described the variable trends of the corresponding fluorescent targets under the excitation spectrum. This method is capable of unmixing multiple fluorescent targets with small EED but labeled with the same fluorochrome, and may be used in imaging of nonspecific probe targeting and metabolism of drugs.
荧光分子断层扫描（FMT）能够在体内细胞和分子水平上可视化生物活性，已广泛应用于小动物的药物递送和肿瘤检测研究。FMT逆问题的不适定性使得重建和分离具有不同功能特征但用相同荧光染料标记的多个相邻荧光靶点变得困难。我们先前的研究提出了一种基于独立成分分析的多光谱激发FMT方法。结果表明，该方法可以分离具有一定边缘到边缘距离（EED）的双荧光靶点。在本研究中，将这种情况推广到分离多个相邻荧光靶点（即两个以上荧光靶点且EED = 0）。关于所提算法分辨能力的体模实验表明，该算法在横向和轴向上分离多个相邻荧光靶点方面表现良好。此外，我们恢复了每个独立荧光靶点的位置信息，并描述了相应荧光靶点在激发光谱下的变化趋势。该方法能够分离具有小EED但用相同荧光染料标记的多个荧光靶点，可用于非特异性探针靶向成像和药物代谢成像。
