2022 年 39 巻 2 号 p. 14-18
Phoacouastic (PA) imaging has been gaining attention as a new imaging modality that can non-invasively visualize blood vessels inside biological tissues. In this paper, the reconstruction process of PA, and its technical issues. In the process of imaging large body parts through multi-scan fusion, alignment turns out to be an important issue, since body motion degrades image quality. In this paper, we carefully examine the characteristics of PA images and propose a novel registration method that achieves better alignment while effectively decomposing the shot volumes into low-rank foreground (blood vessels), dense background (noise), and sparse complement (corruption) components on the basis of the PA characteristics. The results of experiments using a challenging real dataset demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, which significantly improved image quality, and had the best alignment accuracy among the state-of-the-art methods tested. We also introduce several clinical application of photoacoustic imaging, such as planning of flap surgery.