In vivo fluorescence spectra unmixing and autofluorescence removal by sparse nonnegative matrix factorization.

Fluorescence imaging locates fluorescent markers that specifically bind to targets; like tumors, markers are injected to a patient, optimally excited with near-infrared light, and located thanks to backward-emitted fluorescence analysis. To investigate thick and diffusive media, as the fluorescence signal decreases exponentially with the light travel distance, the autofluorescence of biological tissues comes to be a limiting factor. To remove autofluorescence and isolate specific fluorescence, a spectroscopic approach, based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), is explored. To improve results on spatially sparse markers detection, we suggest a new constrained NMF algorithm that takes sparsity constraints into account. A comparative study between both algorithms is proposed on simulated and in vivo data.