Multi-wavelength fluorescence tomography

The strong scattering and absorption of light in biological tissue makes it challenging to model the propagation of light, especially in deep tissue. This is especially true in fluorescent tomography, which aims to recover the internal fluorescence source distribution from the measured light intensities on the surface of the tissue. The inherently ill-posed and underdetermined nature of the inverse problem along with strong tissue scattering makes Fluorescence Tomography (FT) extremely challenging. Previously, multispectral detection fluorescent tomography (FT) has been shown to improve the image quality of FT by incorporating the spectral filtering of biological tissue to provide depth information to overcome the inherent absorption and scattering limitations. We investigate whether multi-wavelength fluorescent tomography can be used to distinguish the signals from multiple fluorophores with overlapping fluorescence spectrums using a unique near-infrared (NIR) swept laser. In this work, a small feasibility study was performed to see whether multi-wavelength FT can be used to detect subtle shifts in the absorption spectrum due to differences in fluorophore microenvironment.