Reconstruction of fluorescence/bioluminescence sources in biological medium with spatial filter.

We propose a new method for reconstruction of emitting source distributions by use of a spatial filter and a successive updating process of the forward model for fluorescence/bioluminescence diffuse optical tomography. The spatial filter transforms a set of the measurement data to a single source strength at a position of interest, and the forward model is updated by use of the estimated source strengths. This updating process ignores the dispensable source positions from reconstruction according to the reconstructed source distribution, and the spatial resolution of the reconstructed image is improved. The estimated sources are also used for the reduction of artifacts induced by noises based on the singular value decomposition. Some numerical experiments show the advantages of the proposed method by comparing the present results with those obtained by the conventional methods of the least squares method nd Algebraic Reconstruction Technique. Finally the criteria for practical use of the method are quantitatively presented by the simulations for 2D and 3D geometries.