Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) is limited in guiding irradiation for soft tissue targets. As a complementary imaging modality, bioluminescence tomography (BLT) provides strong soft tissue contrast. We developed a dual-use BLT system which consists of an optical assembly, a mobile cart and an independent mouse bed. The system is motorized which can easily dock onto an independent mouse bed operating as a standalone system for longitudinal bioluminescence imaging (BLI)/BLT studies and also dock onto the SARRP for on-line radiation guidance.
Our initial tests for the system demonstrate that (i) the imaging depth is 28 mm, (ii) the optical background is sufficiently low and uniform, (iii) the non-uniform response of the optical imaging can be corrected by the flat field correction, and (iv) the imaging acquisition speed was improved by an average of 3.7 times faster than our previous systems. We also presented a geometry calibration procedure to map the planar BLIs acquired at multi-projections onto the surface of the CBCT image. The CBCT is required to generate the mesh for BLT reconstruction and used for treatment planning and radiation delivery. Feasibility study of the geometry calibration was performed on a manual-docking prototype. The mean and maximum mapping accuracy is 0.3 and 0.6 mm. The performance of the proposed motorized dual-use system is expected to be superior to that of the manual-docking prototype because of the mechanism stability. We anticipate the dual-use system as a highly efficient and cost-effective platform to facilitate optical imaging for preclinical radiation research.
Pharmacokinetic rates have the potential to provide quantitative physiological and pathological information for biological studies and drug development. Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) is an attractive imaging tool for three-dimensionally resolving fluorophore distribution in small animals. In this letter, pharmacokinetic rates of indocyanine green (ICG) in mouse liver are imaged with a hybrid FMT and x-ray computed tomography (XCT) system. A recently developed FMT method using structural priors from an XCT system is adopted to improve the quality of FMT reconstruction. In the in vivo experiments, images of uptake and excretion rates of ICG in mouse liver are obtained, which can be used to quantitatively evaluate liver function. The accuracy of the results is validated by a fiber-based fluorescence measurement system.
This article [Opt. Eng.. 52, (1 ), 019001 (2013)] was originally published on 3 January 2013 with Figs. 12–3 out of order. The corrected figures and captions are reprinted below.
Monte Carlo (MC) method is generally used as a “gold standard” technique to simulate photon transport in biomedical optics. However, it is quite time-consuming since abundant photon propagations need to be simulated in order to achieve an accurate result. In the case of complicated geometry, the computation speed is bound up with the calculation of the intersection between the photon transmission path and media boundary. The ray-triangle-based method is often used to calculate the photon-boundary intersection in the shape-based MC simulation for light propagation, but it is still relatively time-consuming. We present a fast way to determine the photon-boundary intersection. Triangle meshes are used to describe the boundary structure. A line segment instead of a ray is used to check if there exists a photon-boundary intersection, as the next location of the photon in light transports is determined by the step size. Results suggest that by simply replacing the conventional ray-triangle-based method with the proposed line segment-triangle-based method, the MC simulation for light propagation in the mouse model can be speeded up by more than 35%.
The adaptive finite element method (AFEM) is an effective way to retain enough resolution in selected regions while improving computational efficiency for reconstruction in fluorescent molecular tomography (FMT). In addition, background optical properties acquired by diffuse optical tomography (DOT) will improve the quality of reconstructed images. In this work, a DOT-guided adaptive reconstruction method (DGARM) is proposed, in which DOT is introduced into an adaptive reconstruction framework of FMT. Besides being used as functional a priori information in the forward modeling, the reconstructed local absorption coefficients in DOT are also used to form internal structural a priori information, which is further used to identify regions of interest (ROIs) in the mesh refinement of the adaptive procedure. Because optical properties are recovered before the formulation of FMT, a linear relationship is established between the fluorescent field and boundary measurements. We implemented numerical simulations and physical experiments to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. Compared with the strategies of uniform meshing with DOT and AFEM without DOT, DGAM improves localization accuracy of the reconstruction of fluorescence inclusion.
Subsurface fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) has promising potential for noninvasive characterization of molecular and cellular activities in small animals by tomographic means in reflectance geometry. In this work, subsurface FMT is employed to monitor the therapeutic response of cisplatin in tumor-bearing mice in vivo. The localization and quantification accuracy of subsurface FMT are demonstrated in phantom. In the in vivo study, the red fluorescent protein activities not only on the surface but in the interior tumor are tracked three-dimensionally during the antitumor treatment.
Simultaneous positron emission tomography (PET) and fluorescence tomography (FT) for in vivo imaging of small animals is proposed by a dual-modality system. This system combines a charge-coupled device-based near-infrared fluorescence imaging with a planar detector pair-based PET. With [18F]-2-fluoro-2-deoxy-d-glucose radioactive tracer and the protease activated fluorescence probe, on the one hand, the simultaneous metabolic activity and protease activity in tumor region are revealed by the PET and FT, respectively. On the other hand, the protease activity both on the surface layer and the deep tissue of the tumor is provided by the fluorescence reflection imaging and FT, respectively.
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