Suppressing physiological interferences and physical noises in functional diffuse optical tomography via tandem...

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Optics
• Neuroimaging Techniques
• Signal Processing

Background:

• Functional diffuse optical tomography (fDOT) is susceptible to physiological interferences and physical noises, limiting its performance.
• Accurate neuroimaging requires robust methods to suppress artifacts and enhance signal quality.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a tandem method for performance enhancement in fDOT.
• To simultaneously suppress physiological interferences and physical noises in fDOT data.

Main Methods:

• A two-phase approach combining inversion filtering and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network classification.
• Phase 1: Pre-reconstruction of absorption perturbation maps (scalp-skull and cerebral-cortex layers) followed by adaptive filtering using estimated physiological interference.
• Phase 2: LSTM network-based fusion strategy to generate a binary mask for removing physical noises, integrated with the 3D reconstruction.

Main Results:

• The proposed tandem scheme effectively suppresses physiological interferences and physical noises.
• Simulative investigations and in-vivo experiments demonstrated improved performance in fDOT.
• The method provides a cost-effective and physically explicable way to enhance fDOT imaging.

Conclusions:

• The tandem method significantly improves the reliability, quantification, and resolution of fDOT.
• This approach is promising for real-time neuroimaging applications, enabling better acquisition of cortical neural activation information.