Persistent luminescence tomography for small animal imaging.

Fluorescence imaging is a widely used in vivo optical imaging technique for preclinical studies, but strong tissue autofluorescence and external excitation light make it suffer from a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Recently, a new optical imaging method using persistent luminescence has become of interest due to its advantage of circumvention of autofluorescence and bleed-through of excitation light during signal acquisition. In this work, we proposed a tomographic imaging method based on persistent luminescence named persistent luminescence tomography (PLT), which can obtain three dimensional distributions of persistent luminescence probes deep inside small animals. Persistent luminescence signals can last several hours after excitation, which makes it possible for PLT to collect signals without interference by autofluorescence and bleed-through of excitation light, and then to reconstruct tomographic images of high quality. Phantom and mouse experiments are implemented to verify the feasiblity of PLT.