1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an imaging system, more particularly to a system and method for specificity-based multimodality three-dimensional optical tomography imaging.
2. Description of Prior Art
Recently, optical molecular image is a new technology developed fast among various modes of molecular image. The optical molecular image technology may apply a successive on-body imaging to the entire of an organism in a noninvasive manner in real time, and visualizes variable information such as physiological, metabolism, or cell molecule level of the organism by using a method of three-dimensional tomography imaging, facilitating the development of related biomedical research applications.
Three-dimensional optical tomography imaging is an ill-posed inverse problem due to the limited information that may be measured during the imaging process to locate a target to be reconstructed, and thus there is no unique finite solution for such inverse problem in general. In order to get a reasonable result, it is desirable to apply more known information and constraint conditions in the construction to mitigate ill-posedness of the problem. Currently, the widely used approaches include multi-spectral boundary data measuring and permissible source region setting. Although these approaches improve the reliability of the tomography imaging to a certain degree, they impose critical requirement on the experiment conditions and is hard to be located accurately in practical imaging applications.
The robustness of three-dimensional optical tomography imaging also relies on the development of a new imaging technology. Most of the traditional methods are local optimal in the view of optimization, so that the process of imaging highly depends on an iteration initial guess. Accordingly, it is necessary to provide a sufficiently precise initial guess and performs the reconstruction in a quite small area to achieve an ideal imaging effect, and consequentially the practicability of the imaging technology is reduced. In the process of image reconstructing, the imaging quality also depends on a parameter setting, which always depends on only an experiential selection. These limitations seriously constrain the application of optical three-dimensional imaging tomography.
For the above described problems, an object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for specificity-based multimodality three-dimensional optical tomography imaging.
In accordance with an aspect of the present invention, a method for specificity-based multimodality three-dimensional optical tomography imaging comprises steps of:
optical imaging to obtain a light intensity of body surface optical signal of an imaging target;
CT imaging to obtain structure volume data;
establishing an equation representing the linear relationship between the distribution of the obtained light intensity of body surface optical signal of the imaging target, the obtained CT discrete mesh data and the distribution of unknown internal self-luminescence light sources;
establishing a dynamic sparse regularization target function in every iteration for the equation; and
reconstructing a tomography image.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, a system for specificity-based multimodality three-dimensional optical tomography imaging comprises:
an optical imaging sub-module for obtain a light intensity of body surface optical signal of an imaging object;
a CT imaging sub-module for obtaining structure volume data of the imaging object;
a translating table for controlling the back and forth movements of the imaging object;
a rotating table for rotating to perform optical multi-angle imaging and CT cone beam X-ray scanning on the imaging object;
an electronic control system for controlling the translating table and rotating table;
a rotation control and processing software platform for establishing an equation representing the linear relationship between the distribution of the obtained light intensity of body surface optical signal of the imaging target, the obtained CT discrete mesh data and the distribution of unknown internal self-luminescence light sources, establishing a dynamic sparse regularization target function in every iteration for the equation, and
reconstructing a tomography image.
The present invention well considers the optical specificity of tissue, in which there is a non-uniform optical characteristic parameter distribution within the same tissue when finite element modeling is used, which is closer to the real situation, so that an accurate imaging effect is achieved. The reconstruction method of the present invention may apply a whole-body three-dimensional tomography imaging to the imaging object, avoiding the dependence on the priori knowledge of locating a rough distributed position of the reconstruction target. The invention uses the sparse regularization technology, which improves the robustness of image reconstruction by using the sparse distribution characteristic of the reconstruction target within the imaging object, and greatly reduces the dependence on the regularization parameter selection.
In order to solve the ill-posedness problem in reconstruction, a method for optical three-dimensional tomography imaging based on a multimodality combination technology is provided in the present invention. The present invention involves mainly two modes: optical imaging and X-ray tomography imaging (CT). On one hand, optical imaging has an advantage of high contrast, but its spatial resolution is poor; on the other hand, X-ray tomography imaging (CT) has a high spatial resolution, but its contrast is poor. Therefore, combination of these two modes can effectively improve the quality of imaging and provide more comprehensive physiological information, achieving a complementary of advantages. In particular, the CT imaging technology and the optical imaging technology is combined, and more independent information are introduced to the image reconstruction for optical three-dimensional tomography imaging by providing the knowledge of the complex surface figure and internal anatomical structure of the imaging object, such that the ill-posedness in the imaging of the imaging object is mitigated, thereby the accuracy and reliability of the imaging are improved.
After the anatomical structure information is obtained by the CT imaging technology, it is also desirable to take further research on how to make full use of such structure information. An intuitive manner is to assume optical parameters in the imaging object are homogeneous, which means that optical parameters in the same tissue are consistent. In general, this assumption is a reasonable estimation of the real situation in case that there is no more priori knowledge. However, in many cases, such assumption of homogeneous has a great error, for example, when imaging a tumor, optical absorption coefficient in tumor area is higher than that in the surrounding normal tissue area due to the existence of newly formed blood vessels. Accordingly the distribution of optical parameters is not uniform even in the same tissue, i.e. the biological tissue has specificity. Therefore, the present invention provides a specificity-based optical tomography imaging technology, which can model an optical characteristic of a tissue more accurately and thus achieve a more accurate imaging result.
In order to deal with the robustness problem of optical three-dimensional tomography imaging, the present invention provides a method for reconstructing based on whole-body imaging without priori knowledge of the position of the reconstruction target; and a global optimization method is used to greatly reduce the dependency on the initial value. In addition, the present invention uses a sparse regularization technique to makes full use of the sparseness characteristics of the reconstruction target, increasing the robustness of imaging and greatly decreasing the dependency on the regularization parameter selection.
As shown in
The process begins with step 201.
In step 202, an imaging object is placed on the imaging two-dimensional translating table and rotating table, the movement, rotation of the imaging object is controlled by the control and processing software platform such that the imaging object may be contained in both the imaging range of the optical imaging sub-module and the imaging range of the CT imaging sub-module; and through controlling the step motor to drive by the control and processing software platform, the optical imaging sub-module is used to apply multi-angle imaging to the body surface of the imaging object to achieve an optical signal distribution of 360° on the body surface.
In step 203, the CT imaging sub-module is used to obtain X-ray image data of the imaging object, and the structure volume data information of the imaging object is reconstructed by the software platform and then is subjected to image segmentation and mesh discretization.
In step 204, a finite element equation, representing a linear relationship between the distribution of the light intensity of body surface optical signal of the imaging target obtained by optical imaging, the CT discrete mesh data obtained by CT imaging, and the distribution of unknown internal self-luminescence light sources, is established based on an approximate model describing the diffusion of the light propagation within the imaging object. The equation is represented as: MX=Φ, where M is a system matrix describing the linear relationship, X is a vector representing the distribution of the reconstruction target within the imaging object, Φ is a vector representing a distribution of light intensity of optical signal on the surface of the imaging object.
In step 205, establishing a target function updated in every iteration. The target function T(k)(X) is typically as follows:
where |MX−Φ∥22 represents a precision item, ∥WS(k)1/2X∥22 is a sparse regularization item, and
ensures the target function in every regularization iteration is equivalent to a target function
where the sparse weight matrix WS(k)=diag(τS,ε
In step 206, tomography imaging is performed by using the three-dimensional tomography imaging reconstruction method.
In step 207, a reconstruction result is obtained and the process is ended.
As shown in
In step 302, the CT data information is segmented by the software platform to obtain a distribution map of the tissues of a primary organ and form a surface mesh.
In step 303, a tetrahedron mesh is formed by using surface mesh of respective tissues, and then non-uniform optical characteristic parameters are assigned to the tetrahedron based on a specificity model.
As shown in
In step 401, inputs the system matrix M, the surface measured optical vector Φ, an exponential gain coefficient α, the weight gain coefficient γ, the maximum θmax and minimum θmin of attenuation coefficient, and then initializes the distribution vector X(0) of an unknown reconstruction target, the sparse weight matrix WS(0), a reconstruction termination threshold
In step 402, updates WS(k)=diag(τS,ε
In step 403, calculates an increment
∥∇T(k)(X(k))+∇2T(k)(X(k))
sets the increment of reconstruction target rk=
In step 404, determines whether rk meets the following in equation:
∥∇T(k)(X(k)+rk)∥≦[1−t(1−ηk)]∥∇T(k)(X(k))∥, and
if not, turns to step 405, otherwise, turns to step 406;
In step 405, selects θε(θmin, θmax), updates rk=θrk, ηk=1−t(1−ηk), and skips to step 404.
In step 406, updates the reconstruction target distribution vector X(k+1)=X(k)+rk, calculates
In step 407, determines whether the in equation
∥∇T(k)(X(k))∥/∥Φ∥<tol
fulfilled, and,
if not, turns to step 402, otherwise, terminates the image reconstruction.
After the data collection is completed, three-dimensional volume data can be reconstructed by the control and processing software platform, in which the voxel size is 0.10×0.10×0.20 (transverse section×sagittal section×coronal section).
As shown in
As shown in
The input parameters include: system matrix M (1092×4560) and the surface measured optical vector Φ (1092×1). p=1 in the sparse regularization target function. The exponential gain coefficient α=1.618, and the weight gain coefficient γ=0.01, the maximum of attenuation coefficient θmax=0.99 and minimum of attenuation coefficient θmin=0.01. Then unknown reconstruction object distribution vector is initialized as homogeneous distribution and X(0)=0, sparse weight matrix WS(0)=I (unit matrix), the resolving threshold
The method for image reconstructing based on sparse regularization and entire body imaging in accordance with the present invention is used for reconstruction, depending on multimodality optical and CT data, under regularization parameters of different orders of magnitude. The image reconstruction result shows that the reconstruction target within the imaging object is insensitive to the choice of regularization parameter. The reconstruction result is substantially consistent under is different regularization parameters and the reconstruction errors are all within 1 mm.
As shown in
The unknown reconstruction object distribution vector is initialized as homogeneous distribution and adopt the following 8 groups parameters: X(0)=0, X(0)=10, X(0)=20, X(0)=50, X(0)=80, X(0)=100, X(0)=150, X(0)=200. The regularization parameters λ are set to 4×10−2 respectively, and the other parameters are the same as in
Likewise, the method for image reconstructing of the present invention is used to reconstruct under above described different initial values, in which the reconstruction result shows that the obtained reconstruction target distribution is substantially consistent with the real position and the reconstruction errors are all within 1 mm.
The present invention can establish a detection technology platform integrating vivo molecular imaging study, medical application and drug screening, on which a robust reconstruction may be performed, providing a foundation for a practical application such as vivo locating of reconstruction target.
The foregoing description gives only the embodiments of the present invention, and the scope of the present invention is not limited thereto. It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that many modifications and alternatives can be made without departing from the principles and spirits of the invention, and they shall fall into the scope of the present invention. Therefore the scope of the present invention is determined by the claims.
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | PCT/CN2010/001930 | Nov 2010 | US |
Child | 13535774 | US |