Mixed Total Variation and 𝐿1 Regularization Method for Optical Tomography Based on Radiative Transfer Equation

Optical tomography is an emerging and important molecular imaging modality. The aim of optical tomography is to reconstruct optical properties of human tissues. In this paper, we focus on reconstructing the absorption coefficient based on the radiative transfer equation (RTE). It is an ill-posed parameter identification problem. Regularization methods have been broadly applied to reconstruct the optical coefficients, such as the total variation (TV) regularization and the 𝐿1 regularization. In order to better reconstruct the piecewise constant and sparse coefficient distributions, TV and 𝐿1 norms are combined as the regularization. The forward problem is discretized with the discontinuous Galerkin method on the spatial space and the finite element method on the angular space. The minimization problem is solved by a Jacobian-based Levenberg-Marquardt type method which is equipped with a split Bregman algorithms for the 𝐿1 regularization. We use the adjoint method to compute the Jacobian matrix which dramatically improves the computation efficiency. By comparing with the other imaging reconstruction methods based on TV and 𝐿1 regularizations, the simulation results show the validity and efficiency of the proposed method.