Seamless stitching for 4D opto-acoustic imaging

Supervision: Christoph Hennersperger, Daniel Razansky, Prof. Dr. Nassir Navab

Student: Suhanyaa Nitkunanantharajah

Abstract

Optoacoustic tomography enables high resolution biological imaging based on the excitation of ultrasound waves due to the absorption of light. A laser pulse penetrates soft tissue up to a few centimeters in depth and provides 3D-visualization of biological tissues. With its rich contrast and high spatial and temporal resolution optoacoustic tomography is especially preferred for vasculature imaging. The size of a single optoacoustic volume is limited by the size and the field of view of the scanner. In order to get a good general view of the finer biological structure, however, greater field of views are necessary.

During this master thesis we will investigate several methods for combining multiple volumes into one larger volume and evaluate which of those existing methods are adaptable for optoacoustic scans. Therefore, we need to find a way to align volumes to each other without having their positions tracked. Additionally, the voxels in the overlapping areas have to be blended in a way that any abrupt transitions or resolution losses are avoided, even though the resolution of each scan decreases around the volume edges and with distance to the scanner. Finally, we aim to propose a method to seamlessly stitch several optoacoustic scans into one high resolution volume without any additional information on the position of the single volumes.