Temperature-modulated bioluminescence tomography.

It was recently reported that bioluminescent spectra can be significantly affected by temperature, which we recognize as a major opportunity to overcome the inherent illposedness of bioluminescence tomography (BLT). In this paper, we propose temperature-modulated bioluminescence tomography (TBT) to utilize the temperature dependence of bioluminescence for superior BLT performance. Specifically, we employ a focused ultrasound array to heat small volumes of interest (VOI) one at a time, and induce a detectable change in the optical signal on the body surface of a mouse. Based on this type of information, the BLT reconstruction can be stabilized and improved. Our numerical experiments clearly demonstrate the merits of our TBT with either noise-free or noisy datasets. Also, this idea is applicable in 2D bioluminescence imaging and computational optical biopsy (COB). We believe that our approach and technology represents a major step forward in the field of BLT, and has an important and immediate applicability in bioluminescence imaging of small animals in general.