Optical Molecular Imaging System And Experimental Validation

Optical Molecular Imaging is a new generation of medical imaging technologyafter the Structural and Functional Imaging, which is a kind of importantnondestructive detection imaging method, and has a lot of advantages such as a highsensitivity, low cost, easy to use, etc. Optical Molecular Imaging technology includestwo main imaging approaches: Bioluminescent Imaging (BLI) and FluorescenceMolecular Tomography (FMT). Bioluminescent imaging source is a single wavelengthof photons transformed from the chemical energy during the biochemical reactionprocess with the protein enzymes catalysis of the in vivo specific reported geneexpression. The photons transmit through the body after complex biological functionwith the organisms, and can be detected by optical imaging system. FMT needsexternal light source to stimulate the biology fluorescent marker known asfluorescence groups. The outer electrons of fluorescence transfer from the ground stateto a higher level excited state after the stimulation. The electrons on the excited statesare non-stable, and will fall to lower level track automatically, at the same time,specific wavelength of the photons is radiated out. This part of the photons will beeventually captured by high sensitivity and high resolution optical detectors after beingabsorbed and scattered by the biological tissue.In this paper, BLI system and FMT have been developed. The main works includehow to select the key parts of these two systems, system validation experiments design,experimental data processing, etc. Phantom experiments and mouse gastric cancerexperiment have been designed to acquire the experimental data using these twosystems. Using the finite element reconstruction algorithm to rebuild the light sourcesfrom the experimental data, and further to verify the reliability of system and thefeasibility of algorithm.