Comparison of fluorescence tomographic imaging in mice with early-arriving and quasi-continuous-wave photons.

The highly diffuse nature of light propagation in biological tissue is a major challenge for obtaining high-fidelity fluorescence tomographic images. In this work we investigated the use of time-gated detection of early-arriving photons for reducing the effects of light scatter in mice relative to quasi-cw photons. When analyzing sinographic representations of the measured data, it was determined that early photons allowed a reduction in the measured FWHM of fluorescent targets by a factor of approximately 2-3, yielding a significant improvement in the tomographic image reconstruction quality.