Reconstruction of deforming aortas in two-photon autofluorescence image sequences

Information loss may occur frequently in the imaging of living tissues by using two-photon fluorescence microscopy due to the intensive deformation of the tissue. A landmark-based optical flow interpolation scheme is proposed for image reconstruction of living aorta walls in two-photon autofluorescence image sequences. Landmarks are extracted and evaluated by an active contour-based aorta model, and are aligned and reconstructed by use of a hierarchical algorithm. The accuracy of the calculation of optical flow is improved by applying landmark-based image warping. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms commonly used optical flow interpolation techniques for the reconstruction of intensively deforming tissues.