JBO Letters

Abstract. Fluorescence microscopy allows real-time moni-toring of optical molecular probes for disease characteriza-tion, drug development, and tissue regeneration. However, when a biological sample is thicker than 1 mm, intense scattering of light would significantly degrade the spatial resolution of fluorescence microscopy. In this paper, we de-velop a fluorescence microtomography technique that uti-lizes the Monte Carlo method to image fluorescence re-porters in thick biological samples. This approach is based on an l0-regularized tomography model and provides an ex-cellent solution. Our studies on biomimetic tissue scaffolds have demonstrated that the proposed approach is capable of localizing and quantifying the distribution of optical molec-ular probe accurately and reliably. C©2011 Society of Photo-Optica