Bioluminescence tomography with structural and functional a priori information

Multispectral bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is one of the seemingly promising approaches to recover 3D tomographic images of bioluminescence source distribution in vivo. In bioluminescence tomography, internal light source, such as luciferase is activated within a volume and multiple wavelength emission data from the internal bioluminescence sources is acquired for reconstruction. The underline non-uniqueness problem associated with non-spectrally resolved intensity-based bioluminescence tomography was demonstrated by Dehghani et al. and it also shown that using a spectrally resolved technique, an accurate solution for the source distribution can be calculated from the measured data if both functional and anatomical a priori information are at hand. Thus it is of great desire to develop an imaging system that is capable of simultaneously acquiring both the optical and structural a priori information as well as acquiring the bioluminescence data. In this paper we present our first combined optical tomography and CT system which constitutes with a cool CCD camera ( perkin elmer "cold blue"), laser launching units and Xray CT( Dxray proto-type). It is capable of acquiring non contact diffuse optical tomography (DOT) data which is used for functional a priori; X-ray CT images which yields the structure information; and BLT images. Physical phantom experiments are designed to verify the system accuracy, repeatability and resolution. These studies shows the feasibility of such imaging system and its potential.