An adaptive meshless method for spectrally resolved bioluminescence tomography

As a novel optical molecular imaging technology, bioluminescence tomography (BLT) has become a research focus which can localize and quantify an internal light source with the bioluminescent signal on the external surface of a small animal. However, BLT is ill-posed because of complex photon propagation in the biological tissue and noisy boundary measured data. Moreover, the disadvantage of the finite element method (FEM) commonly used in BLT is emerged gradually due to the troublesome mesh discretization. Therefore, an adaptive meshless method is presented to perform a quantitative reconstruction of the bioluminescent source for spectrally resolved BLT in this contribution, which not only can reduce the ill-posedness of BLT effectively through the application of multi-spectral information but also can avoid the time-consuming mesh generation. In addition, the reconstruction can be largely improved using adaptive technology based on a posteriori error estimation. Finally, the performance of this method is evaluated by numerical simulation experiments.