A self-normalized, full time-resolved method for fluorescence diffuse optical tomography.

A full time-resolved scheme that has been previously applied in diffuse optical tomography is extended to time-domain fluorescence diffuse optical tomography regime, based on a finite-element-finite-time-difference photon diffusion modeling and a Newton-Raphson inversion framework. The merits of using full time-resolved data are twofold: it helps evaluate the intrinsic performance of time-domain mode for improvement of image quality and set up a valuable reference to the assessment of computationally efficient featured-data-based algorithms, and provides a self-normalized implementation to preclude the necessity of the scaling-factor calibration and spectroscopic-feature assessments of the system as well as to overcome the adversity of system instability. We validate the proposed methodology using simulated data, and evaluate its performances of simultaneous recovery of the fluorescent yield and lifetime as well as its superiority to the featured-data one in the fidelity of image reconstruction.