Due to modeling and experimental imperfections, multispectral optoacoustic tomography images are often afflicted with negative values, which are further amplified when propagating into the spectrally unmixed images of chromophore concentrations. Since negative values have no physical meaning, accuracy can potentially be improved by imposing non-negativity constraints on the initial reconstructions and the unmixing steps. Herein, we compare several non-negative constrained approaches with reconstruction and spectral unmixing performed separately or combined in a single inverse step. The quantitative performance and sensitivity of the different approaches in detecting small amounts of spectrally-distinct chromophores are studied in tissue-mimicking phantoms and mouse experiments.

Date Published: 3 March 2017
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10064, Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2017, 100641B (3 March 2017);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10064:
Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2017
Alexander A. Oraevsky; Lihong V. Wang, Editor(s)