Reconstruction of Fluorescence Molecular Tomography via a Fused LASSO Method Based on Group Sparsity Prior.

Objective: The aim of this paper is to improve the reconstruction accuracy in both position and source region of fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT).

Methods: The reconstruction of the FMT is challenging due to its serious ill-posedness and ill-condition. Currently, to obtain the fluorescent sources accurately, more a priori information of the fluorescent sources is utilized and more efficient and practical methods are proposed. In this paper, we took the group sparsity of the fluorescent sources as a new type of priori information in the FMT, and proposed the fused LASSO method (FLM) for FMT. The FLM based on group sparsity prior not only takes advantage of the sparsity of the fluorescent sources, but also utilizes the structure of the sources, thus making the reconstruction results more accuracy and morphologically similar to the sources. To further improve the reconstruction efficiency, we adopt Nesterov's method to solve the FLM.

Results: Both heterogeneous numerical simulation experiments and in vivo mouse experiments were carried out to verify the property of the FLM. The results have verified the superiority of the FLM over conventional methods in tumor detection and tumor morphological reconstruction. Furthermore, the in vivo experiments had demonstrated that the FLM has great potential in preclinical application of the FMT.

Significance: The reconstruction method based on group sparsity prior has a great potential in the FMT study, it can further improve the reconstruction quality, which has practical significance in preclinical research.