Photoacoustic image improvement based on a combination of sparse coding and filtering.
JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL OPTICS 2020;
25:JBO-200164RR. [PMID:
33029991 PMCID:
PMC7540346 DOI:
10.1117/1.jbo.25.10.106001]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/02/2020] [Accepted: 09/16/2020] [Indexed: 05/07/2023]
Abstract
SIGNIFICANCE
Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) has been greatly developed in a broad range of diagnostic applications. The efficiency of light to sound conversion in PAI is limited by the ubiquitous noise arising from the tissue background, leading to a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and thus a poor quality of images. Frame averaging has been widely used to reduce the noise; however, it compromises the temporal resolution of PAI.
AIM
We propose an approach for photoacoustic (PA) signal denoising based on a combination of low-pass filtering and sparse coding (LPFSC).
APPROACH
LPFSC method is based on the fact that PA signal can be modeled as the sum of low frequency and sparse components, which allows for the reduction of noise levels using a hybrid alternating direction method of multipliers in an optimization process.
RESULTS
LPFSC method was evaluated using in-silico and experimental phantoms. The results show a 26% improvement in the peak SNR of PA signal compared to the averaging method for in-silico data. On average, LPFSC method offers a 63% improvement in the image contrast-to-noise ratio and a 33% improvement in the structural similarity index compared to the averaging method for objects located at three different depths, ranging from 10 to 20 mm, in a porcine tissue phantom.
CONCLUSIONS
The proposed method is an effective tool for PA signal denoising, whereas it ultimately improves the quality of reconstructed images, especially at higher depths, without limiting the image acquisition speed.
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