In Vivo Mouse Bioluminescence Tomography with Radionuclide-Based Imaging Validation

Bioluminescence imaging, especially planar bioluminescence imaging, has been extensively applied in in vivo preclinical biological research. Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) has the potential to provide more accurate imaging information due to its 3D reconstruction compared with its planar counterpart. In this work, we introduce a positron emission tomography (PET) radionuclide imaging-based strategy to validate the BLT results. X-ray computed tomography, PET, spectrally resolved bioluminescence imaging, and surgical excision were performed on a tumor xenograft mouse model expressing a bioluminescent reporter gene. With different spectrally resolved measured data, the BLT reconstructions were acquired based on the third-order simplified spherical harmonics (SP3) approximation and the diffusion approximation (DA). The corresponding tomographic images were obtained for validation of bioluminescence source reconstruction. Our results show the strength of PET imaging compared with other validation methods for BLT and improved source localization accuracy based on the SP3 approximation compared with the diffusion approximation.