A high-sensitive diffuse fluorescence tomography system with CT-analogous scanning mode

Diffuse fluorescence tomography (DFT) provides spatial distributions of fluorescence parameters by measuring fluorescence signals of probes or agents that are targeted to interior specific molecules or tissues. The potential applications of DFT can be found in drug development and early tumor diagnosis. This work proposes a CT-analogous mode of DFT, where the imaging chamber is impinged by collimated beam from a fiber-coupled laser diode and the resultant fluorescence re-emissions on the opposite side, i.e., the so-called "projections", are collected by eight detection fibers placed from 101.25º to 258.75º perspectives opposite to the incidence that are then successively filtered out into a photon-counting channel for quantification. By rotating the imaging chamber or phantom at an angular, the system acquires the "projections" of surface-emitted fluorescence under different perspectives as a CT system does. This ease of acquiring a large data-set enables realization of high-quality imaging. Pilot experiments on phantoms with Cy5.5-target embedded have validated the efficacy of the proposed method.