Fast reconstruction of fluorophore concentration variation based on the derivation of the diffusion equation.

The information of fluorophore concentration variation (FCV) has the potential for drug development and tumor studies, but the reconstruction of FCV is time-consuming in dynamic fluorescence molecular tomography (DFMT). In this paper, a time-efficient reconstruction method for FCV is presented. The system equation of this method is derived from the derivation of the diffusion equation, and its size does not change with the number of frames. The computational time can be significantly reduced by using this method because the images of different frames are reconstructed separately. Simulations and phantom experiments are performed to validate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that compared with the previous method, the proposed method can obtain better results and consumes less computational time with the same number of iterations. In addition, the time consumption in a single iteration of the proposed method increases much slower with the number of frames.