PDE-constrained multispectral imaging of tissue chromophores with the equation of radiative transfer

We introduce a transport-theory-based PDE-constrained multispectral model for direct imaging of the spatial distributions of chromophores concentrations in biological tissue. The method solves the forward problem (boundary radiance at each wavelength) and the inverse problem (spatial distribution of chromophores concentrations), in an all-at-once manner in the framework of a reduced Hessian sequential quadratic programming method. To illustrate the code’s performance, we present numerical and experimental studies involving tumor bearing mice. It is shown that the PDE-constrained multispectral method accelerates the reconstruction process by up to 15 times compared to unconstrained reconstruction algorithms and provides more accurate results as compared to the so-called two-step approach to multi-wavelength imaging.