Total variation regularization for bioluminescence tomography with the split Bregman method.

Regularization methods have been broadly applied to bioluminescence tomography (BLT) to obtain stable solutions, including l2 and l1 regularizations. However, l2 regularization can oversmooth reconstructed images and l1 regularization may sparsify the source distribution, which degrades image quality. In this paper, the use of total variation (TV) regularization in BLT is investigated. Since a nonnegativity constraint can lead to improved image quality, the nonnegative constraint should be considered in BLT. However, TV regularization with a nonnegativity constraint is extremely difficult to solve due to its nondifferentiability and nonlinearity. The aim of this work is to validate the split Bregman method to minimize the TV regularization problem with a nonnegativity constraint for BLT. The performance of split Bregman-resolved TV (SBRTV) based BLT reconstruction algorithm was verified with numerical and in vivo experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the SBRTV regularization can provide better regularization quality over l2 and l1 regularizations.