A reconstruction method guided by early-photon fluorescence yield tomography is proposed for time-domain fluorescence lifetime tomography （FLT） in this study. The method employs the early-arriving photons to reconstruct a fluorescence yield map, which is utilized as a priori information to reconstruct the FLT via all the photons along the temporal-point spread functions. Phantom experiments demonstrate that, compared with the method using all the photons for reconstruction of fluorescence yield and lifetime maps, the proposed method can achieve higher spatial resolution and reduced crosstalk between different targets without sacrificing the quantification accuracy of lifetime and contrast between heterogeneous targets.
In order to improve the reconstruction accuracy in fluorescence molecular tomography （FMT）, a common ap- proach is to increase the number of fluorescence data or projections. However, this approach consumes too much memory space and computational time. In this Letter, a data compression strategy that involves the removal of the redundant information from both intra- and inter-projections is proposed to reduce the dimension of the FMT inverse problem. The performance of this strategy is tested with phantom and in vivo mouse experiments. The results demonstrate that the proposed data compression strategy can accelerate the FMT reconstruction nearly tenfold and almost without any quality degradation.
