Near infrared fluorescence imaging of small animals with simultaneously estimated structural information

We present a robust technique for diffuse optical fluorescence imaging of tumors in mice and tissue simulating fluorescence phantoms. The detection optics, which is a crucial part of a frequency domain fluorescence imaging system, with appropriate optical filters for efficient rejection of the excitation light, is demonstrated. The image reconstruction is divided into two parts; i.e. reconstructing the target locations such as size and position, and reconstructing the functional information such as fluorophore concentration and image reconstruction. The structural parameters i.e. tumor size and locations of the targets are recovered by a chi-square fitting technique by fitting the experimental data into analytically generated data. Having the structural information beforehand, the images are reconstructed by using our dual-mesh technique. The fluorescence images of targets of few tens of nanomolar fluorophore concentrations in both homogeneous and heterogeneous media are reconstructed in this study.