Hybrid photoacoustic fluorescence molecular tomography using finite-element-based inversion.

Improvements in fluorescence reconstruction when utilizing a hybrid photoacoustic (PAT) fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) method to image optically heterogeneous media are studied and showcased. Quantitative optical absorption maps are retrieved using a normalized backprojection algorithm for PAT reconstruction. Consecutively, the reconstructed absorption distribution is employed into computing a diffusion-equation-based forward model for FMT using a finite-element solution. The potential promise of the suggested method is experimentally verified on tissue-mimicking fluorescent phantoms, where improvements in the quality of FMT reconstructions are observed when imaging at the presence of a large absorber.