Development of a fully rotational non-contact fluorescence tomographer for small animals

We present herein the development of a fully 360/spl deg/ rotatable fluorescence tomography system for small animals without the use of source and detector fibers, or optically matching fluids. The setup consists of a cooled CCD camera coupled to a wide-angle objective and an axially moveable, collimated laser source integrated within a rotating light-tight chamber. The system's capability to acquire and reconstruct high density datasets is demonstrated with experimental results from phantoms.