A novel approach for studies of multispectral bioluminescence tomography

Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a promising new area in biomedical imaging. The goal of BLT is to provide quantitative reconstruction of bioluminescent source distribution within a small animal from optical signals on the animal’s body surface. The multispectral version of BLT takes advantage of the measurement information in different spectrum bands. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the multispectral BLT. The new feature of the mathematical framework is to use numerical prediction results based on two related but distinct boundary value problems. This mathematical framework includes the conventional framework in the study of multispectral BLT. For the new framework introduced here, we establish the solution existence, uniqueness and continuous dependence on data, and characterize the limiting behaviors when the regularization parameter approaches zero or when the penalty parameter approaches infinity. We study two kinds of numerical schemes for multispectral BLT and derive error estimates for the numerical solutions. We also present numerical examples to show the performance of the numerical methods.