Prior information in fluorescence molecular tomography based on multispectral fluorescence emission

Abstract

Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) suffers from inherent ill-posedness due to the vast number of possible solutions to the reconstruction problem. To increase the robustness of such a problem one need prior information. We present here a method for rendering a priori information of the position of a fluorescent inclusion inside turbid media. The method utilizes solely two spectral bands within the fluorescence spectrum emitted from the fluorophore. The method is presented and verified using experimental data from a tissue phantom. The confinement is also used to impose weights onto the voxels before the inversion of the linear set of equations describing the FMT problem.