MRI guided Fluorescence Optical Tomography for Small Animal Imaging

We present 3-D reconstructions of ICG fluorescence from time domain optical measurements on a phantom model mouse, imbedded with the near-infrared flurophore, Indocyanine green (ICG) . The complex medium boundary of the mouse phantom was obtained from MRI images, and subsequently incorporated in a linearized, finite-difference diffusion equation based forward model to reconstruct the flurophore properties The procedure illustrated here will subsequently be applied to in-vivo small animal fluorescence measurements, with diffusion and transport based forward models that utilize the detailed MRI images of the mouse tissue structure