In vivo tomography imaging based on bioluminescence

The most important task for bioluminescence imaging is to identify the emission source from the captured bioluminescent signal on the surface of a small tested animal. Quantitative information on the source location, geometry and intensity serves for in-vivo monitoring of infectious diseases, tumor growth, metastases in the small animal. In this paper, we present a point-spread function-based method for reconstructing the internal bioluminescent source from the surface light output flux signal. The method is evaluated for sensing the internal emission sources in nylon phantoms and within a live mouse. The surface bioluminescent signal is taken with a highly sensitive CCD camera. The results show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed point-spread function-based method.