L1/2 regularization based numerical method for effective reconstruction of bioluminescence tomography

Even though bioluminescence tomography (BLT) exhibits significant potential and wide applications in macroscopic imaging of small animals in vivo, the inverse reconstruction is still a tough problem that has plagued researchers in a related area. The ill-posedness of inverse reconstruction arises from insufficient measurements and modeling errors, so that the inverse reconstruction cannot be solved directly. In this study, an l1/2 regularization based numerical method was developed for effective reconstruction of BLT. In the method, the inverse reconstruction of BLT was constrained into an l1/2 regularization problem, and then the weighted interior-point algorithm (WIPA) was applied to solve the problem through transforming it into obtaining the solution of a series of l1 regularizers. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method were demonstrated with numerical simulations on a digital mouse. Stability verification experiments further illustrated the robustness of the proposed method for different levels of Gaussian noise