The First Bioluminescence Tomography System for Simultaneous Acquisition of Multiview and Multispectral Data

We describe the system design of the first bioluminescence tomography (BLT) system for parallel acquisition of multiple bioluminescent views around a mouse in a number of spectral channels simultaneously. The primary component of this BLT system is a novel mirror module and a unique mouse holder. The mirror module consists of a mounting plate and four mirrors with stages. These mirror stages are right triangular blocks symmetrically arranged and attached to the mounting plate such that the hypotenuse surfaces of the triangular blocks all make 45. to the plate surface. The cylindrical/polygonal mouse holder has semi-transparent rainbow bands on its side surface for the acquisition of spectrally resolved data. Numerical studies and experiments are performed to demonstrate the feasibility of this system. It is shown that bioluminescent signals collected using our system can produce a similar BLT reconstruction quality while reducing the data acquisition time, as compared to the sequential data acquisition mode. Copyright (C) 2006 Ge Wang et al.