Abstract

Optical properties heterogeneities in small-animals can deeply affect diffuse optical fluorescence data. This can severely limit the precision of fluorescence tomography when the forward model is built assuming homogeneous absorption and scattering coefficients. In this work, we introduce a photon propagation forward model in which local estimates of a sample’s optical properties are used for each source-detector combination, rather than a single global estimate of those optical properties. These estimates may be obtained from either time-resolved data collected at the laser’s wavelength, or based on a priori information gained through another imaging modality. We show that without increasing the computational complexity, our model improves the correlation with independently simulated heterogeneous fluorescence data in the case of optical property heterogeneity levels typically observed in mice.

© 2007 SPIE