| The purpose of the project was to construct a bioluminescence tomography system which uses a priori information from other modalities. The thesis begins with a description of its motivation, followed by its background and development, and then describes the instrumentation and experimental results and finally the conclusion and discussion. A tri-modality bioluminescence, diffuse optical, and x-ray tomography (BLT-DOT-XCT) system for small animal imaging is developed in this work. The XCT and DOT are present to supplement BLT with anatomical and functional information. The reliability of the hybrid system was tested and confirmed with phantom studies. Finally in vivo animal studies were carried out with nude mice. The research conducted in this thesis work has potential to benefit basic biologists by providing a system that can quantitatively resolve the bioluminescence source distribution in heterogeneous media. |
