Tomographic bioluminescence imaging with varying boundary conditions.

Three-dimensional bioluminescence imaging is an emerging technique that can be used to monitor molecular events in intact living systems. The inverse problem of 3D bioluminescence imaging does not have a unique solution because it requires reconstruction of a 3D source function from a 2D one. A novel approach that addresses this problem with the aid of a simple experimental setup and solves the uniqueness problem of the solution for a monochromatic measurement set is suggested here. The approach is verified numerically by reconstructing bioluminescent objects of various shapes embedded inside highly scattering media, such as biologiçal tissue.