Phosphorescence lifetime imaging in turbid media: the inverse problem and experimental image reconstruction.

Three-dimensional phosphorescence lifetime imaging is a novel method for the mapping of oxygen concentration in biological tissues. We present reconstruction techniques for recovering phosphorescent objects in highly scattering media based on the telegraph equation and two regularization methods, i.e., the Tikhonov-Phillips regularization and the maximum entropy method. Theoretical results are experimentally validated, and the reconstructed images of phosphorescent objects rendering oxygen maps in a layer are presented.