Sparse Coding-Enabled Low-Fluence Multi-Parametric Photoacoustic Microscopy

Uniquely capable of simultaneous imaging of the hemoglobin concentration, blood oxygenation, and flow speed at the microvascular level
in vivo
, multi-parametric photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) has shown considerable impact in biomedicine. However, the multi-parametric PAM acquisition requires dense sampling and thus a high laser pulse repetition rate (up to MHz), which sets a strict limit on the applicable pulse energy due to safety considerations. A similar limitation is shared by high-speed PAM, which also uses lasers with high pulse repetition rates. To achieve high quantitative accuracy besides good structural visualization at low levels of laser fluence in PAM, we have developed a new, sparse coding-based two-step denoising technique. In the setting of intravital brain imaging, we demonstrated that this unsupervised learning approach enabled the reduction of the laser fluence in PAM by 5 times without compromise of the image quality (structural similarity index measure or SSIM: >0.92) and the quantitative accuracy (errors: <4.9%). Offering a significant relaxation in the requirement of PAM on laser fluence while maintaining the quality of structural imaging and accuracy of quantitative measurements, this sparse coding-based approach is expected to facilitate the application and clinical translation of multi-parametric PAM and high-speed PAM, which have a tight photon budget due to either safety considerations or laser source limitations.