Image reconstruction for diffuse optical tomography based on radiative transfer equation

Diffuse optical tomography is a novel molecular imaging technology for small animal studies. Most known reconstruction methods use the diffusion equation (DA) as forward model, although the validation of DA breaks down in certain situations. In this work, we use the radiative transfer equation as forward model which provides an accurate description of the light propagation within biological media and investigate the potential of sparsity constraints in solving the diffuse optical tomography inverse problem. The feasibility of the sparsity reconstruction approach is evaluated by boundary angular-averaged measurement data and internal angular-averaged measurement data. Simulation results demonstrate that in most of the test cases the reconstructions with sparsity regularization are both qualitatively and quantitatively more reliable than those with standard L₂ regularization. Results also show the competitive performance of the split Bregman algorithm for the DOT image reconstruction with sparsity regularization compared with other existing L₁ algorithms.