Efficient Deep Model-Based Optoacoustic Image Reconstruction

Clinical adoption of multispectral optoacoustic tomography necessitates improvements of the image quality available in real-time, as well as a reduction in the scanner financial cost. Deep learning approaches have recently unlocked the reconstruction of high-quality optoacoustic images in real-time. However, currently used deep neural network architectures require powerful graphics processing units to infer images at sufficiently high frame-rates, consequently greatly increasing the price tag. Herein we propose EfficientDeepMB, a relatively lightweight (17M parameters) network architecture achieving high frame-rates on medium-sized graphics cards with no noticeable downgrade in image quality. EfficientDeepMB is built upon DeepMB, a previously established deep learning framework to reconstruct high-quality images in real-time, and upon EfficientNet, a network architectures designed to operate of mobile devices. We demonstrate the performance of EfficientDeepMB in terms of reconstruction speed and accuracy using a large and diverse dataset of in vivo optoacoustic scans. EfficientDeepMB is about three to five times faster than DeepMB: deployed on a medium-sized NVIDIA RTX A2000 Ada, EfficientDeepMB reconstructs images at speeds enabling live image feedback (59 Hz) while DeepMB fails to meets the real-time inference threshold (14 Hz). The quantitative difference between the reconstruction accuracy of EfficientDeepMB and DeepMB is marginal (data residual norms of 0.1560 vs. 0.1487, mean absolute error of 0.642 vs. 0.745). There are no perceptible qualitative differences between images inferred with the two reconstruction methods.