ABSTRACT
Fluorescence imaging based on exogenous contrast agents is a highly sensitive, target-specic molecular imaging technology and may become an important diagnostic tool in personalized medicine. Conventional uorescence imaging, however, can provide only planner or projection images, and no depth information is available, which limits its use to small or thin samples. In 1996, Arjun Yodh’s laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, presented a theoretical work in Optics Letters on tomographic reconstruction of a uorescent object in thick turbid media using a Born-type analytical method (O’Leary et al. 1996). Randall Barbour and Eva Sevick subsequently reported similar theoretical work in 1997 in Journal of the Optical Society of America A and Applied Optics using perturbation-based analytical and nite difference methods, respectively (Chang et al. 1997, Paithankar et al. 1997). In January 1996, I was invited to interview at Sevick’s laboratory at Purdue University, Indiana, for a postdoctoral position, during which time I realized the importance of developing a nite element method (FEM)-based reconstruction algorithm for uorescence diffuse optical tomography (DOT) or uorescence molecular tomography (FMT). With Sevick’s help, I quickly wrote a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellowship grant (also named Individual National Service Award) based on this idea and submitted it to NIH before I moved from Hanover, New Hampshire, to West Lafayette, Indiana, in April 1996. The grant was funded in the rst run in the end of 1996; however, the transition in 1997 from a postdoctoral fellow to an assistant professor of physics at Clemson University, South Carolina, delayed the completion of my uorescence work. Section 6.2 details this rst FEM-based reconstruction algorithm for FMT.
