Application of computational breast phantoms to evaluate reconstruction methods for fluorescence molecular tomography

Abstract: Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) has potential of providing high contrast images for breast tumor detection. Computational phantom provides a convenient way to a wide variety of fluorophore distribution configurations in patients and perform comprehensive evaluation of the imaging systems and methods for FMT. In this study, a digital breast phantom was used to compare the performance of a novel sparsity-based reconstruction method and Tikhonov regularization method for resolving tumors with different amount of separation. The results showed that the proposed sparse reconstruction method yielded better performance. This simulation-based approach with computational phantoms enabled an evaluation of the reconstruction methods for FMT for breast-cancer detection.