3d Tetrahedron Mesh Refinement For Fluorescence Tomography Reconstruction

Optical Molecular Imaging technique is a novel branch of medical imaging that has the potential to diagnose the metabolic and functional state of tissue at the cellular and molecular level. Light in the visible or near infrared spectrum penetrates several centimeters inside the body and can be measured on the surface. External light illuminating a body penetrates the tissues up to injected fluorescent molecules which absorb and reemit light at a different wavelength. Detection of the emitted light on the surface of the body can be coupled to a Fluorescence Tomography Reconstruction (FTR) algorithm to recover the location of fluorescent concentration inside the body. In order to precisely localize the fluorescent sources, numerical techniques (e.g. Finite Element Method) are used to solve the mathematical formulation which describes photon propagation in tissues. Specifically, we have developed a remeshing module to generate valid meshes for FEM in the application of FTR, this algorithm combines tetrahedron collapse operation with refinement operation,driven by cost functions specific to Fluorescence Tomography Reconstruction. Results show an increase of mesh quality and density on the final mesh which becomes a valid mesh for Fluorescence Tomography Reconstruction.