4-D reconstruction of fluorescence molecular tomography using re-assembled measurement data.

Challenges remain in the reconstruction of dynamic (4-D) fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT). In our previous work, we implemented a fully 4-D FMT reconstruction approach using Karhunen-Loève (KL) transformation. However, in the reconstruction processes, the input data were scan-by-scan fluorescence projections. As a result, the reconstruction interval is limited by the data acquisition time for scanning one circle projections, leading to a long time (typically >1 min). In this paper, we propose a new method to reduce the reconstruction interval of dynamic FMT imaging, which is achieved by re-assembling the acquired fluorescence projection sequence. Further, to eliminate the temporal correlations within measurement data, the re-assembled projection sequence is reconstructed by the KL-based method. The numerical simulation and in vivo experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of the method. The experimental results indicate that after re-assembling measurement data, the reconstruction interval can be greatly reduced (~2.5 sec/frame). In addition, the proposed re-assembling method is helpful for improving reconstruction quality of the KL-based method.