Reconstruction of vasculature in optical resolution photoacoustic microscopy using wavelet and Hessian based method

Abstract

Photoacoustic microscopy is a high-resolution and high- contrast function modality where optical absorption is detected by ultrasonic transducer. The noise generated by the detector due to its size, sensitivity make the photoacoustic images difficult to visualize. Denoising and reconstruction of vascular structures is crucial for the early diagnosis and therapy in many medical applications. Therefore, the accurate detection of blood vessels has a great significance to assist the users including radiologists and clinicians by making them visualization of the vascular information in the images. In the proposed method, use of wavelet filtering to enhance the effect of smaller and bigger vessels in Optical Resolution Photoacoustic Microscopy (OR-PAM) is analyzed. The proposed method uses the wavelet to enhance the vasculature and then Hessian based method is applied to classify the vessel-like structures. For the evaluation, the algorithm is tested on photoacoustic images acquired non-invasively from living m...