Deep learning-based mesoscopic fluorescence molecular tomography: an in silico study

Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT), as well as mesoscopic FMT (MFMT) is widely employed to investigate molecular level processes ex vivo or in vivo. However, acquiring depth-localized and less blurry reconstruction still remains challenging, especially when fluorophore (dye) is located within large scattering coefficient media. Herein, a two-stage deep learning-based three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction algorithm is proposed. The key point for the proposed algorithm is to employ a 3-D convolutional neural network to correctly predict the boundary of reconstructions, leading refined results. Compared with conventional algorithm, in silico experiments show that relative volume and absolute centroid error reduce over $$ whereas intersection over union increases over 15% for most situations. These results preliminarily indicate the promising future of appropriately applying machine learning (deep learning)-based methods in MFMT.