Context encoding enables machine learning-based quantitative photoacoustics
This addresses the problem of real-time monitoring of tissue parameters like blood oxygenation for medical diagnosis and therapy, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the challenge of quantifying optical absorption in photoacoustic imaging by introducing the first machine learning-based approach, which uses context encoding to achieve highly accurate and robust results in simulated experiments.
Real-time monitoring of functional tissue parameters, such as local blood oxygenation, based on optical imaging could provide groundbreaking advances in the diagnosis and interventional therapy of various diseases. While photoacoustic (PA) imaging is a novel modality with great potential to measure optical absorption deep inside tissue, quantification of the measurements remains a major challenge. In this paper, we introduce the first machine learning based approach to quantitative PA imaging (qPAI), which relies on learning the fluence in a voxel to deduce the corresponding optical absorption. The method encodes relevant information of the measured signal and the characteristics of the imaging system in voxel-based feature vectors, which allow the generation of thousands of training samples from a single simulated PA image. Comprehensive in silico experiments suggest that context encoding (CE)-qPAI enables highly accurate and robust quantification of the local fluence and thereby the optical absorption from PA images.