The development, characterisation and testing of a novel all-optical, multi-modal preclinical biomedical imaging system is presented. The system aims to provide a new way of accurately visualising the spatial distribution and activity of molecular structures and processes in small animals by combining 3D bioluminescence tomography (BLT; reconstruction-based 3D imaging of internal bioluminescent reporter distributions), diffuse optical tomography (DOT; reconstruction-based imaging of optical parameter distributions) and optical surface capture techniques. The key principle of the imaging system is to use surface capture results to enhance the accuracy of DOT image reconstruction, and to use the results of both surface capture and DOT to enhance the accuracy of BLT. Presented experiments show that the developed system can reconstruct luminescent source distributions and optical parameters accurately and that small animal imaging is feasible with the system
