Enhancement of the localization and quantitative performance of fluorescence molecular tomography by using linear nBorn method

The nonlinear normalized Born ratio (nBorn) method normalizes emission data with excitation data nonlinearly, which makes the relative distributions of the normalized measurements different from those of the emission data. When compared with the reconstruction using only emission data, what the nonlinear nBorn method does is equivalent to introducing the noisy excitation data to emission data. In our linear nBorn method, the emission data for each projection is linearly normalized with the average excitation data of all detectors. Phantom and in vivo mice studies indicate that the linear nBorn method provides better localization and quantitative performance than the nonlinear nBorn method.