Modeling and reconstruction of optical tomography for endoscopic applications: Simulation demonstration

Applications of optical tomography in noninvasive cancer imaging have been restricted to specific organs that can be measured or transilluminated externally. However, these external measurements are limited to superficial area or small animals, and inaccurate or immeasurable for imaging the internal organ deep inside the large body. Endoscopic optical tomography (EOT) overcomes this limitation and improves this inaccuracy or immeasurability by taking the detector closer to the region of interest with a minimally invasive approach. In this letter, we present an endoscopic algorithm for EOT, including establishing a realistic endoscopic geometry, constructing an accurate forward model and advancing an effective inverse reconstruction algorithm. Bioluminescent mode based simulations show the accuracy and effectiveness of the endoscopic algorithm in both localization and quantification.