ABPO-TVSCAD: alternating Bregman proximity operators approach based on TVSCAD regularization for bioluminescence tomography

Objective. Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a promising non-invasive optical medical imaging technique, which can visualize and quantitatively analyze the distribution of tumor cells in living tissues. However, due to the influence of photon scattering effect and ill-conditioned inverse problem, the reconstruction result is unsatisfactory. The purpose of this study is to improve the reconstruction performance of BLT. Approach. An alternating Bregman proximity operators (ABPO) method based on TVSCAD regularization is proposed for BLT reconstruction. TVSCAD combines the anisotropic total variation (TV) regularization constraints and the non-convex smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) penalty constraints, to make a trade-off between the sparsity and edge preservation of the source. ABPO approach is used to solve the TVSCAD model (ABPO-TVSCAD for short). In addition, to accelerate the convergence speed of the ABPO, we adapt the strategy of shrinking the permission source region, which further improves the performance of ABPO-TVSCAD. Main results. The results of numerical simulations and in vivo xenograft mouse experiment show that our proposed method achieved superior accuracy in spatial localization and morphological reconstruction of bioluminescent source. Significance. ABPO-TVSCAD is an effective and robust reconstruction method for BLT, and we hope that this method can promote the development of optical molecular tomography.