Yu An, Jie Liu, Guanglei Zhang, Jinzuo Ye, Yang Du, Yamin Mao, Chongwei Chi and Jie Tian, Beijing Jiaotong University; Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Volume:62, Issue:7, Page(s): 1818-1826
Fluorescence Molecular Tomography (FMT) enables three-dimensional (3D) visualization as well as quantitative analysis of tumors in small animals in vivo. Consistent efforts are still being made to develop more advanced reconstruction methods for FMT to increase the accuracy and efficiency. In this study, we proposed a novel region reconstruction method called the L1-norm regularization piecewise constant level set (L1-PCLS) approach. We introduced the level set function to be a priori information to describe the characteristics of the fluorescent regions, while we exploited the L1-norm regularization to encompass the sparsity and contrast of the target. To accurately and effectively solve the L1-PCLS model, the augmented Lagrangian-based optimization were employed. To evaluate the performance of L1-PCLS, numerical phantom experiments and in vivo bead-implanted mouse experiments were performed. The results suggested that the proposed approach enhanced the accuracy of 30%-50% compared with the conventional reconstruction methods, and the computation time reduced by more than 2 times. When the intensities of the fluorescent regions were different (the intensity ratio for the two regions was less than 1:2), the proposed method performed better in both regions reconstruction. Our results suggested that the proposed region reconstruction method was able to ensure the accuracy and efficiency of reconstructing the features of the fluorescent regions, and the proposed method could be feasibly adopted in in vivo applications. Research Websites: www.3dmed.net and www.mitk.net