Deep Learning-based Mesoscopic Fluorescence Molecular Tomography: an Study

Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT), as well as mesoscopic FMT (MFMT) is widely employed to investigate molecular level processes or . However, acquiring depth-localized and less blurry reconstruction still remains challenging, especially when fluorophore (dye) is located within large scattering coefficient media. Herein, a two-stage deep learning-based three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction algorithm is proposed. The key point for the proposed algorithm is to employ a 3-D convolutional neural network to correctly predict the boundary of reconstructions, leading refined results. Compared with conventional algorithm, experiments show that relative volume and absolute centroid error reduce over whereas intersection over union increases over 15% for most situations. These results preliminarily indicate the promising future of appropriately applying machine learning (deep learning)-based methods in MFMT.