Multimodal optical molecular image reconstruction with frequency domain measurements

Multimodality molecular imaging is becoming more and more important to understand both the structural and the functional characteristics of tissue, organs and tumors. So far, invasive nuclear methods utilizing ionizing radiation have been the "gold standard" of molecular imaging. We investigate non-contact, non-invasive, patient-tolerant and inexpensive near infrared (NIR) frequency domain optical tomography (FDOT) as a functional complement to structural X-ray computed tomography (CT) data. We show a novel multifrequency NIR FDOT approach both in transmission and reflectance mode and employ radiative transport equation (RTE) for 3D reconstruction of a target with novel fluorescent gold nanoshell indocyanine green (NS ICG) in an ex vivo nude mouse. The results demonstrate that gold NS ICG with multifrequency NIR FDOT is a promising fluorophore for multimodal optical molecular image reconstruction.