Region-based diffuse optical tomography with registered atlas: acquisition of mouse optical properties.

The reconstruction quality in the model-based optical tomography modalities can greatly benefit from information of accurate tissue optical properties, which are difficult to be obtained with a conventional diffuse optical tomography (DOT) system alone. One of the solutions is to apply anatomical structures obtained with anatomical imaging systems such as X-ray computed tomography (XCT) to constrain the reconstruction process of DOT. However, since X-ray offers low soft-tissue contrast, segmentation of abdominal organs from sole XCT images can be problematic. In order to overcome the challenges, the current study proposes a novel method of recovering organ-oriented tissue optical properties, where anatomical structures of an mouse are approximately obtained by registering a standard anatomical atlas, , the Digimouse, to the target XCT volume with the non-rigid image registration, and, in turn, employed to guide DOT for extracting the optical properties of inner organs. Simulative investigations have validated the methodological availability of such atlas-registration-based DOT strategy in revealing both anatomical structures and optical properties. Further experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed method for acquiring the organ-oriented tissue optical properties of mice, making it as an efficient way of the reconstruction enhancement.