  We present a reconstruction method involving maximum-likelihood expectation
maximization (MLEM) to model Poisson noise as applied to fluorescence molecular
tomography (FMT). MLEM is initialized with the output from a sparse
reconstruction-based approach, which performs truncated singular value
decomposition-based preconditioning followed by fast iterative
shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (FISTA) to enforce sparsity. The motivation
for this approach is that sparsity information could be accounted for within
the initialization, while MLEM would accurately model Poisson noise in the FMT
system. Simulation experiments show the proposed method significantly improves
images qualitatively and quantitatively. The method results in over 20 times
faster convergence compared to uniformly initialized MLEM and improves
robustness to noise compared to pure sparse reconstruction. We also
theoretically justify the ability of the proposed approach to reduce noise in
the background region compared to pure sparse reconstruction. Overall, these
results provide strong evidence to model Poisson noise in FMT reconstruction
and for application of the proposed reconstruction framework to FMT imaging.
