Quantitative Evaluation of Bioluminescence Imaging Based on Radiative Transfer Equation

Bioluminescence imaging is a kind of emerging detection technology at cellular,molecular and genetic level.The most popular bioluminescence imaging model is diffusion approximation(DA).However,because of the ill-posedness of the DA-based inverse problem and the instability of reconstruction algorithms,the location accuracy of the reconstructed sources is low.Radiative transfer equation(RTE),which considers the direction of the photon migration and the effect of absorption and scattering in tissues,can accurately express the transmission of bioluminescent photons through the tissues.In this paper,we studied the bioluminescence imaging based on the RTE.2D simulations were performed,and quantitative evaluation was given by the absolute source position error,the relative source area error and the minimum bounding box.The results of the experiment showed that the imaging quality based on RTE was better than that one based on DA.