Region-based reconstruction method for fluorescent molecular tomography

A common difficulty for the traditional methods of fluorescent molecular tomographic (FMT) reconstruction is that only a small amount of measurements can be used to recover the image comprised of a large number of pixels. This difficulty not only leads to expensive computational cost but also likely results in an unstable solution prone to be affected by the noise in the measurement data. In this paper, we propose a region-based method for reducing the unknowns, where the target areas are determined by searching for the nearest neighbor nodes. In this method, the Hessian matrix of the second-order derivatives is incorporated to speed up the optimization process. An iteration strategy of multi-wavelength measurement is introduced to further improve the accuracy of inverse solutions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can significantly speed up the reconstruction process and improve the image quality of FMT. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America