Overlap time-gating approach for improving time-domain diffuse fluorescence tomography based on the IRF-calibrated Born normalization

Diffuse fluorescence tomography (DFT) methods using the full time-resolved (TR) data have been demonstrated to substantially improve the spatial resolution and quantitative accuracy of reconstructed images. However, these methods usually suffer from low practical feasibility because of the influence of the system impulse response function (IRF) and the trade-off between the used data time-resolution and the required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We present a full TR approach that combines an IRF-calibrated full TR Born normalization and an overlap-delaying time-gate scheme for attaining high SNR without sacrificing the TR information content. The approach is validated with full TR data from phantom experiments for its better performances in the spatial resolution and reconstruction fidelity compared to the traditional DFT methods. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America