Fluorescence-enhanced Optical Tomography using Phase Information

Fluorescence-enhanced optical imaging/tomography (FEOI/FEOT) could play an important role in drug discovery and clinical diagnostics. In recent years, improvement in spatial resolution and quantitative biological information has been increasingly promised. Time- and frequency-resolved FEOT has great potential to obtain improved reconstruction information compared with continuous wave (CW) mode due to the acquisition of more measurement information. In this paper, a phase-only FEOT(PO-FEOT) is proposed and evaluated. In PO-FEOT, a finite element-based linear relationship between the unknown fluorophore variables and phase information obtained from time- and frequency-domain boundary measurements is used in FEOT reconstruction. Synthetic data shows that, compared to the amplitude and phase-based reconstruction, the reconstruction time cost is remarkably reduced when phase is used alone. The reconstructed results show that PO-FEOT with high frequency information can acquire preferable reconstruction quality.