Improving vascular imaging with co-planar mutually guided photoacoustic and diffuse optical tomography: a simulation study

Sadreddin Mahmoodkalayeh; Mehrdad Zarei; Mohammad Ali Ansari; Karl Kratkiewicz; Mohsen Ranjbaran; Rayyan Manwar; Kamran Avanaki

doi:10.1364/BOE.385017

Improving vascular imaging with co-planar mutually guided photoacoustic and diffuse optical tomography: a simulation study

Biomed Opt Express. 2020 Jul 16;11(8):4333-4347. doi: 10.1364/BOE.385017. eCollection 2020 Aug 1.

Authors

Sadreddin Mahmoodkalayeh¹, Mehrdad Zarei², Mohammad Ali Ansari², Karl Kratkiewicz³, Mohsen Ranjbaran⁴, Rayyan Manwar³, Kamran Avanaki^{5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran 19839 69411, Iran.
² Laser and Plasma Research Institute, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran 19839 69411, Iran.
³ Wayne State University, Bioengineering Department, Detroit, Michigan 48201, USA.
⁴ Department of Physics, University of Isfahan, Isfahan 81746-73441, Iran.
⁵ Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60607, USA.
⁶ Department of Dermatology, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60607, USA.

Abstract

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) and photoacoustic tomography (PAT) are functional imaging modalities that provide absorption coefficient maps of the tissue. Spatial resolution of DOT is relatively low due to light scattering characteristics of the tissue. On the other hand, although PAT can resolve regions of different absorptions with a high spatial resolution, measuring the absolute value of optical absorptions using PAT is challenging due to unknown light fluence distribution in the tissue. Development of image guidance techniques using a priori information of imaging target structure has been shown to increase the accuracy of DOT. PAT is one such method that can be used as a complementary modality to serve as a guide for DOT image reconstruction. On the other hand, estimated fluence map provided by DOT can be used to quantitatively correct PAT images. In this study we introduce a mutually-guided imaging system for fast and simultaneous optical and photoacoustic measurements of tissue absorption map, where DOT is guided by the PAT image and vice versa. Using the obtained absorption map of the tissue, we then estimate the tissue scattering map. We conducted this study using a series of simulations on digital phantoms and demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.