Abstract
Bioluminescent imaging has proven to be a valuable tool for
monitoring physiological and pathological activities at cellular
and molecular levels in living small animals. Using biological
techniques, target cells can be tagged with reporters encoding
several kinds of luciferase enzymes, which generate characteristic
photons in a wide spectrum covering the infrared range. Part of
the diffused light can reach the body surface of the small animal,
be separated into several spectral bands using appropriate
filters, and collected by a sensitive CCD camera. Here we present
a bioluminescence tomography (BLT) method for a bioluminescent
source reconstruction from multispectral data measured on the
external surface, and demonstrate the advantages of multispectral
BLT in a numerical study using a heterogeneous mouse chest
phantom. The results show that the multispectral approach
significantly improves the accuracy and stability of the BLT
reconstruction even if the data are highly noisy.