Bioluminescence tomography with CT/MRI co-registration

We present a three-dimensional (3D) bioluminescence image reconstruction method with MRI and CT co-registration for small animal molecular imaging. The multi-spectral light intensity distribution of an optical luciferase-luciferin reporter system is measured at the tissue surface of a small animal for the purpose of 3D image reconstruction. The reporter probe distribution inside tissue is calculated with a linear matrix inversion method and a light propagation model based on the simplified spherical harmonics equations. The animal´s surface geometry and anatomy is determined from co-registered CT and MR images in order to locate the reconstructed source distribution relative to the animal´s anatomy. We present in vivo bioluminescence reconstruction results that demonstrate the performance of our co-registration method.