Toward whole-body quantitative photoacoustic tomography of small-animals with multi-angle light-sheet illuminations

Abstract

Several attempts to achieve the quantitative photoacoustic tomography (q-PAT) have been investigated using point sources or a single-angle wide-field illumination. However, these schemes normally suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or poor quantification in imaging applications on large-size domains, due to the limitation of ANSIsafety incidence and incompleteness in the data acquisition. We herein present a q-PAT implementation that uses multi-angle light-sheet illuminations and calibrated recovering-andaveraging iterations. The scheme can obtain more complete information on the intrinsic absorption from the multi-angle illumination mode, and collect SNR-boosted photoacoustic signals in the selected planes from the wide-field light-sheet excitation. Therefore, the sliced absorption maps over whole body of small-animals can be recovered in a measurementflexible, noise-robust and computation-economic way. The proposed approach is validated by phantom, ex vivo and in vivo experiments, exhibiting promising performances in image fidelity and quantitative accuracy for practical applications. 420-433 (2016). 6. R. Li, P. Wang, L. Lan, F. P. Lloyd, Jr., C. J. Goergen, S. Chen, and J. X. Cheng, "Assessing breast tumor margin by multispectral photoacoustic tomography," Biomed. Opt. Express 6(4), 1273-1281 (2015). 7. M. Schwarz, A. Buehler, J. Aguirre, and V. Ntziachristos, "Three-dimensional multispectral optoacoustic mesoscopy reveals melanin and blood oxygenation in human skin in vivo," J. Biophotonics 9(1-2), 55-60 (2016). 8. J. Xia and L. V. Wang, "Small-animal whole-body photoacoustic tomography: a review," IEEE Trans.

Confidence Estimation for Machine Learning-Based Quantitative Photoacoustics

“…In order to derive quantitative information from initial pressure p 0 reconstructions of photoacoustic images, one has to account for the light fluence and solve the optical inverse problem. Most methods model the distribution of optical absorption coefficients by iteratively updating the distribution after computing the solution of a forward model (cf., e.g., [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]) with inclusion of the acoustic inverse problem [15,16]. Alternatively, in multispectral photoacoustic imaging applications, the functional parameters are approximated directly by using a variety of spectral unmixing techniques (cf., e.g., [17][18][19]).…”

Nonlinear iterative perturbation scheme with simplified spherical harmonics (SP3) light propagation model for quantitative photoacoustic tomography

“…We finally obtain the calibrated task P 0 image , where . Thereafter, the following q‐PAT reconstruction can be performed in a 2‐D framework [26]. Similar calibration methods are proposed by Schweiger and Arridge, which have been widely used in DOT reconstruction [44, 45].…”

“…The appropriate light transport models for the specific imaging scenes and efficient reconstruction schemes based on these light models are two vital aspects in q‐PAT, which are being profoundly studied [13–37]. (a) For the light propagation models in q‐PAT, the radiative transfer equation (RTE) [13–15] and Monte Carlo (MC) method [16–18] are widely regarded as accurate models for describing light propagation in biological tissue.…”

“…Harrison et al have extended this method to a least‐squares fixed‐point iterative method wand have applied it to multiple‐illumination PAT [22]. As a straightforward and useful method, the fixed‐point iteration methods have been used in some practical imaging applications [23–26]. The minimization‐based approaches, which iteratively reduce the difference between a P 0 image and the corresponding optical model, have been shown to successfully recover the optical coefficients from P 0 images.…”

Parallelized Monte Carlo Photon Transport Simulations for Arbitrary Multi-Angle Wide-Field Illumination in Optoacoustic Imaging

“…The initial acoustic pressure P 0 is the product of optical absorption coefficient and light fluence in the irradiated region [7,8]. Since light fluence in the tissue is attenuated along the penetration depth, the result of traditional OAI, i.e., the distribution of P 0 , cannot directly reflect the optical properties of deep tissues, such as optical absorption coefficient [9,10]. To accurately reveal the optical functional information of deep tissues, a precise photon transport modeling approach is necessary to be developed for offering assistance to quantitative OAI methods.…”