A direct method with structural priors for imaging pharmacokinetic parameters in dynamic fluorescence molecular tomography

Images of pharmacokinetic parameters in dynamic fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) have the potential to provide quantitative physiological information for biological studies and drug development. However, images obtained with conventional indirect methods suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio because of failure in efficiently modeling the measurement noise. Besides, FMT suffers from low spatial resolution due to its ill-posed nature, which further reduces the image quality. In this letter, we present a direct method with structural priors for imaging pharmacokinetic parameters, which uses a nonlinear objective function to efficiently model the measurement noise and utilizes the structural priors to mitigate the ill-posedness of FMT. The results of numerical simulations and in vivo mouse experiments demonstrate that the proposed method leads to significant improvements in the image quality.