Accelerated image reconstruction in fluorescence molecular tomography using a nonuniform updating scheme with momentum and ordered subsets methods

Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) is a significant preclinical imaging modality that has been actively studied in the past two decades. It remains a challenging task to obtain fast and accurate reconstruction of fluorescent probe distribution in small animals due to the large computational burden and the ill-posed nature of the inverse problem. We have recently studied a nonuniform multiplicative updating algorithm that combines with the ordered subsets (OS) method for fast convergence. However, increasing the number of OS leads to greater approximation errors and the speed gain from larger number of OS is limited. We propose to further enhance the convergence speed by incorporating a first-order momentum method that uses previous iterations to achieve optimal convergence rate. Using numerical simulations and a cubic phantom experiment, we have systematically compared the effects of the momentum technique, the OS method, and the nonuniform updating scheme in accelerating the FMT reconstruction. We found that the proposed combined method can produce a high-quality image using an order of magnitude less time.