System Research And Experiment Design For Bioluminescence Tomography

Developments of medicine and pharmacy promote the exploration of new imaging technology, which can detect cellular and molecular evens. Molecular Imaging, being the third generation of medical imaging technique, emerges because of the opportunity. This technology has the ability of real-time and non-invasive observation cellular and molecular physiological or pathological changes in vivo. As a novel Molecular Imaging modality, Bioluminescence Tomography (BLT) has become a research hotspot because of its high sensitivity and low price. The key issue of Bioluminescence Imaging research is to develop a high-performance imaging system. Nowadays, the dominant two-dimensional bioluminescence imaging device is IVIS series developed by Xenogen Corporation. Scholars in Biomedical Imaging Division of Virginia Polytechnic University of United States have expanded in-depth study of three-dimensional imaging device and proposed a prototype system combined with Micro-CT. However, the domestic research of BLT system is still being in the beginning phase.Based on the research results of foreign scholars and full investigation, we develop a BLT system and evaluate its performance in this paper. In order to ensure the accuracy of the system, integrating sphere uniform light source system is used to calibrate the CCD camera. As a result, the output difference caused by non-uniformity response of different CCD chips is compensated. Furthermore, mapping function between on the value of image pixel and the light intensity is established. Physical phantoms and real mice based experiments are designed performed to evaluate the performance of the developed system. The corresponding experiment results are used for the reconstruction of internal bioluminescent source with several reconstruction algorithms. Reconstruction results further verify the reliability of the system and the feasibility of the reconstruction algorithms.