Model-independent dynamic constraint to improve the optical reconstruction of regional kinetic parameters.

Optical dye-dilution techniques can quantify kinetic parameters in a region of tissue, but currently rely on a two-step process-spatial reconstruction of the dye concentration, repeated at every time-point, and subsequent kinetic analysis of the time-dependent change in dye concentration. Inaccuracies, in this approach, are due mainly to the ill-posed nature of the spatial reconstruction problem, which propagates into kinetic analysis and result in errors in extracted dynamic parameters. We present a hybrid kinetic deconvolution optical reconstruction algorithm, effectively combining optical reconstruction and model-independent kinetic analysis into a single inverse problem that is better posed. Kinetic parameters of multiple tissue regions can be quantified simultaneously. As proof of principle, we provide numerical experiments in reflectance-based and fluorescence molecular tomography scenarios.