End-to-end deep neural network for optical inversion in quantitative photoacoustic imaging

An end-to-end deep neural network, ResU-net, is developed for quantitative photoacoustic imaging. A residual learning framework is used to facilitate optimization and to gain better accuracy from considerably increased network depth. The contracting and expanding paths enable ResU-net to extract comprehensive context information from multispectral initial pressure images and, subsequently, to infer a quantitative image of chromophore concentration or oxygen saturation (sO₂). According to our numerical experiments, the estimations of sO₂ and indocyanine green concentration are accurate and robust against variations in both optical property and object geometry. An extremely short reconstruction time of 22 ms is achieved.