Optimal sparse solution for fluorescent diffuse optical tomography: theory and phantom experimental results.

We present a method to accurately localize small fluorescent objects within the tissue using fluorescent diffuse optical tomography (FDOT). The proposed method exploits the localized or sparse nature of the fluorophores in the tissue as a priori information to considerably improve the accuracy of the reconstruction of fluorophore distribution. This is accomplished by minimizing a cost function that includes the L1 norm of the fluorophore distribution vector. Experimental results for a milk-based phantom using a fiber-based cw FDOT system demonstrate the capability of this method in accurately localizing small fluorescent objects deep in the phantom.