Non-local means improves total-variation constrained photoacoustic image reconstruction

• Main Authors: Yalavarthy, Phaneendra K., Kalva, Sandeep Kumar, Pramanik, Manojit, Prakash, Jaya
• Other Authors: School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Bioengineering; Deconvolution; Image Reconstruction
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146419
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Photoacoustic/Optoacoustic tomography aims to reconstruct maps of the initial pressure rise induced by the absorption of light pulses in tissue. This reconstruction is an ill-conditioned and under-determined problem, when the data acquisition protocol involves limited detection positions. The aim of the work is to develop an inversion method which integrates denoising procedure within the iterative model-based reconstruction to improve quantitative performance of optoacoustic imaging. Among the model-based schemes, total-variation (TV) constrained reconstruction scheme is a popular approach. In this work, a two-step approach was proposed for improving the TV constrained optoacoustic inversion by adding a non-local means based filtering step within each TV iteration. Compared to TV-based reconstruction, inclusion of this non-local means step resulted in signal-to-noise ratio improvement of 2.5 dB in the reconstructed optoacoustic images.