A Monte Carlo study for excitation field in Cherenkov-excited luminescence scanned tomography

Abstract

Cherenkov-Excited Luminescence Scanned Tomography (CELST) involves a system of coupled continuous wavedomain diffusion equations for modeling. The excitation field quantized by the Complex Cosine (CC) method effectively simulates the forward light process in these equations. However, when considering x-ray-induced Cherenkov light within biological tissue, the CC-based excitation field lacks precision, instead requires the use of stochastic Monte Carlo (MC) methods. To accurately describe the radiation-induced light transport in biological tissue and CELST image reconstruction, in this paper, we develop a MC-based method for CELST, named sheet Monte Carlo (sMC). Experiments show that the sMC field can achieve 11.47 on contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and 0.74 on Pearson correlation (PC), while 7.25 and 0.57 for the CC initialization field under 4% noise level. Furthermore, our results highlight that the proposed excitation field exhibits superior reconstruction performance, especially when dealing with low ratios of fluorescent targets.