Each imaging modality used in molecular imaging has its own advantages and limitations in image quality, biological specificity, signal sensitivity, etc. A combination of various modalities may be therefore necessary to overcome respective disadvantages and obtain additional information. The state-of-the-art technology of multimodality molecular imaging is to acquire images sequentially. In this dissertation, a unique tri-modality SPECT-CT-Optical small animal imaging system is investigated and further refined towards fully co-registered and fully three-dimensional reconstruction of each involved modality. The following topics are involved: construction and optimization of the system; geometric co-calibration leading to intrisically co-registered image reconstruction; a novel reconstruction algorithm for fluorescence-mediated tomography including prior information from CT and SPECT.
Liji Cao