Over the last decade, molecular imaging including optical imaging, which has undergone explosive growth, has tremendously promoted the progress of medical imaging. Based on specifically targeted imaging agents, molecular imaging is expected to broadly expand the capabilities of conventional imaging methods. Molecular imaging will allow scientists and clinicians to not only see where a tumor is located in the body, but also to visualize the activity and expression of specific molecules and biological processes that influence tumor behavior and/or response to therapy. This information is expected to have a major impact on cancer detection, drug development, individualized treatment, as well as understanding of how cancer arises. Bioluminescence tomography is one of important modalities in molecular imaging, and it can localize and quantify the cancer distribution using specifically targeted agents. After several years of continuous research, the imaging theory of bioluminescence tomography has been preliminarily established. Nevertheless, it is known that the inverse problem of tomographic imaging is an ill-posed problem due to the fact that only some limited information can be measured from the boundary of animals to estimate the internal bioluminescent source distribution. The difficulty of the problem is exacerbated as photon has to undergo multiple scattering and absorption when transporting through tissues. Therefore, the international community has been constantly exploring how to reduce the dependency with the rigorous imaging requirements, how to improve the imaging quality, efficiency, and robustness of the reconstruction methods, etc. Based on the background above, related research for bioluminescence tomography has also been carried on in this thesis. According to the difficulty and practical utilization, this thesis focuses on the reconstruction methods to solve the inverse problem and forward problem to accurately describe photon transporting through tissues. In the aspect of study on inverse problem, reconstruction methods have been developed to improve imaging quality and efficiency; in the aspect of study on forward problem, a high-order approximation model has been introduced, and it improved the accuracy for modeling the transporting process to maintain high level imaging quality. Moreover, the multimodality fusion method has been also explored beneficially. The main research work includes: 1.Since the existing methods can not effecti...
修改评论