Multispectral Photoacoustic Imaging Artifact Removal and Denoising Using Time Series Model-Based Spectral Noise Estimation

The aim of this study is to solve a problem of denoising and artifact removal from in vivo multispectral photoacoustic imaging when the level of noise is not known a priori. The study analyzes Wiener filtering in Fourier domain when a family of anisotropic shape filters is considered. The unknown noise and signal power spectral densities are estimated using spectral information of images and the autoregressive of the power 1 ( AR(1)) model. Edge preservation is achieved by detecting image edges in the original and the denoised image and superimposing a weighted contribution of the two edge images to the resulting denoised image. The method is tested on multispectral photoacoustic images from simulations, a tissue-mimicking phantom, as well as in vivo imaging of the mouse, with its performance compared against that of the standard Wiener filtering in Fourier domain. The results reveal better denoising and fine details preservation capabilities of the proposed method when compared to that of the standard Wiener filtering in Fourier domain, suggesting that this could be a useful denoising technique for other multispectral photoacoustic studies.