Quantitative Multi-Modal Optical Coherence Photoacoustic Elastography
For researchers in biomedical imaging, this work provides a method to enhance elastography accuracy by merging complementary absorption and scattering measurements.
The paper introduces a multi-modal optical coherence photoacoustic elastography (OCPE) framework that combines OCT and PAT for improved tissue characterization. Experiments on a silicone phantom show that the hybrid approach achieves higher strain signal-to-noise ratio and better stiffness estimates than either modality alone.
We present a novel multi-modal optical coherence photoacoustic elastography (OCPE) framework, which combines two imaging modalities, optical coherence tomography (OCT) and photoacoustic tomography (PAT), to enable complementary absorption-scattering measurements for the extraction of quantitative tissue features via quasi-static elastography. For this, we develop a sophisticated hybrid inversion algorithm for merging the complementary information layers contained in both OCT and PAT-based elastography measurements, and perform systematic evaluations to assess the impact of hybrid elastography data on strain and stiffness reconstructions. Studies on a silicone elastomer phantom demonstrate that the combined OCT-PAT approach outperforms single-modality OCT elastography and PAT elastography, yielding higher strain signal-to-noise ratio and improved stiffness estimates. These results establish the advantage of multi-modal complementary imaging and data merging for accurate, high-resolution elastographic strain and stiffness mapping in both scattering and absorbing materials.