A new general mathematical framework for bioluminescence tomography

Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a recently developed area in biomedical imaging. The goal of BLT is to quantitatively reconstruct a bioluminescent source distribution within a small animal from optical signals on the surface of the animal body. While there have been theoretical investigations of the BLT problem in the literature, in this paper, we propose a more general mathematical framework for a study of the BLT problem. For the proposed formulation, we establish a well-posedness result and explore its relation to the formulation studied previously in other papers. We introduce numerical methods for solving the BLT problem, show convergence, and derive error estimates for the discrete solutions. Numerical simulation results are presented showing improvement of solution accuracy with the new general mathematical framework over that with the standard formulation of BLT.