Analysis of fast full angle fluorescence diffuse optical tomography with beam-forming illumination.

Challenges remain in imaging fast biological activities through whole body using fluorescence diffuse optical tomography (FDOT). We propose and analyze three full angle FDOT systems with different beam-forming illuminations (BF-FDOT), including line illumination (L-FDOT), area illumination (A-FDOT), and multiple-points illumination (MP-FDOT). Singular value analysis and experimental validation are used to optimize the experimental parameters in terms of hardware design, data collection and utilization. Comparisons are made on the system performance between L-FDOT and the conventional point illumination based full angle FDOT system (P-FDOT) with both numerical simulation and phantom experiment. We demonstrate that at least three cycles of projections are needed for P-FDOT to achieve comparable whole body image quality with L-FDOT. We also compare these three BF-FDOT systems and further discuss how these optimized parameters can be employed to improve spatial and temporal performances within current computational capacities, and guide the design of the BF-FDOT systems.