title: Identification and removal of laser-induced noise in photoacoustic imaging using singular value decomposition.
abstract: Singular value decomposition (SVD) was used to identify and remove laser-induced noise in photoacoustic images acquired with a clinical ultrasound scanner. This noise, which was prominent in the radiofrequency data acquired in parallel from multiple transducer elements, was induced by the excitation light source. It was modelled by truncating the SVD matrices so that only the first few largest singular value components were retained, and subtracted prior to image reconstruction. The dependency of the signal amplitude and the number of the largest singular value components used for noise modeling was investigated for different photoacoustic source geometries. Validation was performed with simulated data and measured noise, and with photoacoustic images acquired from the human forearm and fingerin vivousing L14-5/38 and L40-8/12 linear array clinical imaging probes. The use of only one singular value component was found to be sufficient to achieve near-complete removal of laser-induced noise from reconstructed images. This method has strong potential to increase image quality for a wide range of photoacoustic imaging systems with parallel data acquisition.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK; Equal contribution.
authors.forename: Emma R
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Hill
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK; Equal contribution.
authors.forename: Wenfeng
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Xia
authors.affiliation: Translational Imaging Group (TIG), Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC), Dept. of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Matthew J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Clarkson
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Adrien E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Desjardins
keywords: (100.0100) Image processing; (110.4280) Noise in imaging systems; (110.5120) Photoacoustic imaging