High-fidelity compression for high-throughput photoacoustic microscopy systems

Area of Science:

• Medical imaging
• Biomedical optics
• Data compression

Background:

• Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) provides crucial vascular information for disease diagnosis.
• Large data sizes (gigabytes) of PAM images hinder efficient storage and transportation.
• Real-time compression is needed to overcome data size limitations.

Discussion:

• Implemented and evaluated multiple data compression algorithms in LabVIEW.
• Achieved high compression ratios while maintaining execution times below the pulsed laser repetition rate.
• Validated compression effectiveness using both ex vivo and in vivo imaging.

Key Insights:

• Compressed photoacoustic microscopic images are visually and quantitatively near-identical to uncompressed data.
• Significant data size reduction is achievable with the implemented compression methods.
• Compression facilitates practical storage and real-time transportation of large PAM datasets.

Outlook:

• Potential for integration into clinical diagnostic workflows.
• Enables wider accessibility and sharing of complex biomedical imaging data.
• Further optimization of compression algorithms for enhanced efficiency.