Improved Photoacoustic-Based Oxygen Saturation Estimation With SNR-Regularized Local Fluence Correction.

Naser, Mohamed A; Sampaio, Diego R T; Munoz, Nina M; Wood, Cayla A; Mitcham, Trevor M; Stefan, Wolfgang; Sokolov, Konstantin V; Pavan, Theo Z et al. · IEEE Trans Med Imaging · 2019

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

As photoacoustic (PA) imaging makes its way into the clinic, the accuracy of PA-based metrics becomes increasingly important. To address this need, a method combining finite-element-based local fluence correction (LFC) with signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regularization was developed and validated to accurately estimate oxygen saturation (SO<sub>2</sub>) in tissue. With data from a Vevo LAZR system, performance of our LFC approach was assessed in ex vivo blood targets (37.6%-99.6% SO<sub>2</sub>) and in vivo rat arteries. Estimation error of absolute SO<sub>2</sub> and change in SO<sub>2</sub> reduced from 10.1% and 6.4%, respectively, without LFC to 2.8% and 2.0%, respectively, with LFC, while the accuracy of the LFC method was correlated with the number of wavelengths acquired. This paper demonstrates the need for an SNR-regularized LFC to accurately quantify SO<sub>2</sub> with PA imaging.

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