Reconstruction of fluorophore absorption and fluorescence lifetime using early photon mesoscopic fluorescence molecular tomography: a phantom study.

Significance: Fluorescence molecular lifetime tomography (FMLT) plays an increasingly important role in experimental oncology. The article presents and experimentally verifies an original method of mesoscopic time domain FMLT, based on an asymptotic approximation to the fluorescence source function, which is valid for early arriving photons.

Aim: The aim was to justify the efficiency of the method by experimental scanning and reconstruction of a phantom with a fluorophore.

Early-photon reflectance fluorescence molecular tomography for small animal imaging: Mathematical model and numerical experiment.

The paper presents an original approach to time-domain reflectance fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) of small animals. It is based on the use of early arriving photons and state-of-the-art compressed-sensing-like reconstruction algorithms and aims to improve the spatial resolution of fluorescent images. We deduce the fundamental equation that models the imaging operator and derive analytical representations for the sensitivity functions which are responsible for the reconstruction of the fluorophore absorption coefficient.