Molecular imaging is a newly emerging and rapidly developing biomedical imaging field. It can acquire real-time, non-invasive, dynamic and specific in vivo imaging of physiological and pathological change in living organisms, at cellular and molecular levels, and provide qualitative and quantitative information for the study of disease development and quantitative assessment of drugs in vivo. Dramatic advances in imaging technology have been an important driving force in the development of molecular imaging. Each imaging modality has its merits in one aspect. Fusion of imaging modalities that integrate the strengths of two modalities will provide more comprehensive and accurate information. There is no doubt that multimodality is an obvious trend in molecular imaging. Micro-CT system for small animal imaging has played a critical role in the evolution of molecular imaging. It can obtain high resolution anatomic information with relatively low cost and convenient operation. It has been used to the study of quantitative bone mineral density, bone tumor monitoring, lung cancer monitoring, vascular extraction, and can be combined with other modalities, such as nuclear imaging and optical imaging. Optical imaging has the advantage of high sensitivity, high specificity, non-radioactive and low-cost. Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is one of the important optical imaging modalities. It can detect the molecular and cellular change of living subject by precise bioluminescent source localization. BLT reconstruction is an ill-posed problem, which needs to introduce enough prior information to ensure the uniqueness of solution. 3D anatomical structure provided by micro-CT is one type of important prior information and multimodality fusion is an effective means for acquiring prior information. Before our work, the fusion of micro-CT and BLT is based on image registration, and there is no report on micro-CT and BLT system-level integration. This thesis focuses on micro-CT imaging and its integration with BLT. It mainly includes the following three parts: 1. Research on micro-CT imaging system. A prototype cone-beam micro-CT system for small animal imaging has been developed. Reconstruction artifacts have been effectively reduced by projection data preprocessing. In order to solve geometric offset of the CT system, we propose a method which utilizes the feedback information of the reconstructed image to perform geometry calibration. The detector output stability ...
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