Noise insensitive volumetric fusion method for enhanced photoacoustic microscopy

SIGNIFICANCE: Photoacoustic imaging is an emerging imaging modality that combines the high contrast of optical imaging and the high penetration of acoustic imaging. However, the strong focusing of the laser beam in optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) leads to a limited depth-of-field (DoF). AIM: Here, a volumetric photoacoustic information fusion method was proposed to achieve large volumetric photoacoustic imaging at low cost. APPROACH: First, the initial decision map was built through the focus detection based on the proposed three-dimensional Laplacian operator. Majority filter-based consistency verification and Gaussian filter-based map smoothing were then utilized to generate the final decision map for the construction of photoacoustic imaging with extended DoF. RESULTS: The performance of the proposed method was tested to show that our method can expand the limited DoF by a factor of 1.7 without the sacrifice of lateral resolution. Four sets of multi-focus vessel data at different noise levels were fused to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method can efficiently extend the DoF of OR-PAM under different noise levels.