Fluorescence molecular lifetime tomography based on asymptotic source function approximation: prospects for solving the problem

The paper is devoted to an original method of time-domain fluorescence molecular lifetime tomography (FMLT) based on asymptotic approximation to the fluorescence source function. Such an approximation helps to simplify the expressions that describe the FMLT reconstruction model in the time domain and to formulate the linear inverse problem for a generalized fluorescence parameter distribution function. The method firstly solves this problem and then separates distributions of the fluorophore absorption coefficient and the fluorescence lifetime from the generalized function. The paper analyzes results the authors have obtained during last 5 years in their testing the method in numerical and physical experiments. The method is inferred to be quite promising and directions of further research for its verification as a sub-millimeter resolution method are outlined.