Source sparsity based primal-dual interior-point method for three-dimensional bioluminescence tomography

In this paper, an efficient l₁-regularized reconstruction method named the primal-dual interior-point (PDIP) method is presented for three-dimensional bioluminescence tomography (BLT) based on the adaptive finite element framework. Taking into account the sparse characteristic of the bioluminescent source, the BLT inverse problem is considered to be a linear programming problem and is represented by its primal and dual form. The source localization and quantification are obtained by solving the primal-dual Newton equation system. The comparisons between PDIP and the classical conjugate gradient least square (CGLS) algorithm are implemented to validate our method. Results from numerical simulation and an in vivo mouse experiment demonstrate the credibility and the potential of the proposed method in practical BLT reconstruction.