Monte-Carlo-based inversion scheme for 3D quantitative photoacoustic tomography
- The goal of quantitative photoacoustic tomography (qPAT) is to recover maps of the chromophore distributions from multiwavelength images of the initial pressure. Model-based inversions that incorporate the physical processes underlying the photoacoustic (PA) signal generation represent a promising approach. Monte-Carlo models of the light transport are computationally expensive, but provide accurate fluence distributions predictions, especially in the ballistic and quasi-ballistic regimes. Here, we focus on the inverse problem of 3D qPAT of blood oxygenation and investigate the application of the Monte-Carlo method in a model-based inversion scheme. A forward model of the light transport based on the MCX simulator and acoustic propagation modeled by the k-Wave toolbox was used to generate a PA image data set acquired in a tissue phantom over a planar detection geometry. The combination of the optical and acoustic models is shown to account for limited-view artifacts. In addition, the errors in the fluence due to, for example, partial volume artifacts and absorbers immediately adjacent to the region of interest are investigated. To accomplish large-scale inversions in 3D, the number of degrees of freedom is reduced by applying image segmentation to the initial pressure distribution to extract a limited number of regions with homogeneous optical parameters. The absorber concentration in the tissue phantom was estimated using a coordinate descent parameter search based on the comparison between measured and modeled PA spectra. The estimated relative concentrations using this approach lie within 5 % compared to the known concentrations. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of this approach to recover the blood oxygenation from experimental data.
Author: | Bernhard Kaplan, Jens Buchmann, Steffen Prohaska, Jan Laufer |
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Document Type: | In Proceedings |
Parent Title (English): | Proc. of SPIE, Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2017 |
Volume: | 10064 |
First Page: | 100645J |
Last Page: | 100645J-13 |
Series: | Proc. of SPIE |
Year of first publication: | 2017 |
Preprint: | urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-62318 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2251945 |