Multibeam fluorescence diffuse optical tomography using upconverting nanoparticles

Fluorescence diffuse optical tomography (FDOT) is a biomedical imaging modality that can be used for localization and quantification of fluorescent molecules inside turbid media. In this ill-posed problem, the reconstruction quality is directly determined by the amount and quality of the information obtained from the boundary measurements. Regularly, more information can be obtained by increasing the number of excitation positions in an FDOT system. However, the maximum number of excitation positions is limited by the finite size of the excitation beam. In the present work, we demonstrate a method in FDOT to exploit the unique nonlinear power dependence of upconverting nanoparticles to further increase the amount of information in a raster-scanning setup by including excitation with two beams simultaneously. We show that the additional information can be used to obtain more accurate reconstructions. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America