Multifunctional optical tomography system combining surface extraction and 3D fluorescence reconstruction

Abstract

Macroscopic-level diffuse optical imaging has been widely used in small animal imaging for preclinical research. Due to severe light scattering, 3D reconstruction in diffuse optics is highly ill-posed and sensitive to small noise in measurement. Bringing prior information such as the inner structural or surface information of the imaging object may largely reduce the ill-posed nature of the inverse problem and improve the reconstruction accuracy. Most existing solutions use additional equipment or multimodal techniques (e.g., CT, MRI, etc.). However, these methods pose new challenges such as increased cost and image alignment between different modalities. Herein, we present a novel compact optical tomography system that enables surface extraction using a single programmable scanning module and pinhole modeling. Experiments on phantom and mice show that the system is capable of achieving high-fidelity surface extraction with a minimal error of less than 0.1 mm, which in turn improves the accuracy of 3D fluorescence reconstruction