Deep tissue fluorescence resonance energy transfer imaging and the application of the Bethe-Salpeter equation to non-diffusive wave propagation

Fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) has found many applications in in vitro imaging as an indicator of molecular activity. However, till now, in vivo FRET imaging has been restricted to near-surface multiphoton microscopy. Optical diffusion tomography (ODT) is an emerging tool for deep tissue imaging. In this work, FRET was incorporated in an ODT framework, thereby allowing FRET to be applied in deep tissue imaging. Using simulations and tissue phantom and small animal imaging experiments, the possibility of imaging molecular activity on the nanometer scale using macroscopic measurements is demonstrated.;The diffusion equation model is limited to regions of high scatter and low absorption. The Bethe-Salpeter equation has been used extensively to explain various scattering phenomena and is more fundamental than the Boltzmann transport equation. In this work, the Bethe-Salpeter equation has been investigated for modeling photon transport in the non-diffusive regime.