A fast surface reconstruction method for fluorescence molecular tomography based on cross-beam edge back projection

An accurate surface reconstruction method is important to fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) for it provides boundary information of the domain occupied by the image object which is essential to modeling light propagation in free space and inside the object. In this paper, a method based on cross-beam edge back projection (CEBP) is proposed to achieve fast and three-dimensional (3D) surface reconstruction for FMT. This method consists of a cost effective and easy-to-implement setup; it back-projects the edge of an image object of all projection angles along the actual light propagation path to perform 3D surface reconstruction. Simulation studies and experiments were performed to compare the reconstruction accuracy and computational cost of the CEBP based method and the conventional radon transform (RT) based method. Results demonstrate that the CEBP based method significantly accelerates surface reconstruction compared with the RT based method while keeping similar accuracy.

► A method to achieve 3D surface reconstruction for FMT is proposed.
► The method is based on a cost effective and easy-to-implement setup.
► By largely reducing the pixels to be back projected, the method works fast.
► The method achieves similar accuracy to the conventional back projection method.