Performance evaluation of fluorescence tomography in a Siemens Inveon multimodality scanner

A tri-modal (PET/CT/Optical) small animal tomographic imaging system was developed by integrating our advanced non-contact intensified CCD (ICCD) frequency-domain fluorescence imaging components into a Siemens Inveon scanner. We performed a performance evaluation of the developed imaging system by using the developed regularization-free high-order radiative-transfer-based reconstruction algorithm and custom solid phantoms. Our results show that frequency-domain photon migration (FDPM) fluorescence tomography can achieve better tomographic images with less artifacts and more precise fluorescent source localization compared to the continuous-wave counterpart. The developed multimodal tomographic imaging system provides a powerful tool for translational biomedical research.