Bimodal BLT source reconstruction based on adjoint diffusion equations

As one of molecular imaging, bioluminescence tomography (BLT) aims to recover internal source from surface measurement. Being an ill-posed inverse problem, BLT source reconstruction is usually converted to an optimization problem through regularization. In this contribution, we build a bimodal hybrid imaging system consisting of BLT and micro-CT, and then propose an improved source reconstruction method based on adjoint diffusion equations (ADEs). Compared with conventional methods based on constrained minimization problem (CMP), ADEs-based method replaces expensive iterative computation with solving a group of linear ADEs. Given surface flux density, internal source power density and photon fluence rate can be efficiently determined in one step. Both numerical and physical experiments are performed to evaluate the bimodal BLT/micro-CT imaging system and this novel reconstruction method. The relevant results demonstrate the feasibility and potential of this source reconstruction method.