SignificancePhotoacoustic tomography (PAT) has great potential in monitoring disease progression and treatment response in breast cancer. However, due to variations in breast repositioning, there is a chance of geometric misalignment between images. Further, poor repositioning can affect light fluence distribution and imaging field-of-view, making images different from one another. The net effect is that it becomes challenging to distinguish between image changes due to repositioning effects and those due to true biological variations.AimThe aim is to develop a three-dimensional image registration framework for geometrically aligning repeated PAT volumetric images, which are potentially affected by repositioning effects such as misalignment, changed radiant exposure conditions, and different fields-of-view.ApproachThe proposed framework involves the use of a coordinate-based neural network to represent the displacement field between pairs of PAT volumetric images. A loss function based on normalized cross correlation and Frangi vesselness feature extraction at multiple scales was implemented. We refer to our image registration framework as MUVINN-reg, which stands for multiscale vesselness-based image registration using neural networks. The approach was tested on a longitudinal dataset of healthy volunteer breast PAT images acquired with the hybrid photoacoustic-ultrasound Photoacoustic Mammoscope 3 imaging system. The registration performance was also tested under unfavorable repositioning conditions such as intentional mispositioning, and variation in breast-supporting cup size between measurements.ResultsA total of 13 pairs of repeated PAT scans were included in this study. MUVINN-reg showed excellent performance in co-registering each pair of images. The proposed framework was shown to be robust to image intensity shifts and field-of-view changes. Furthermore, MUVINN-reg could align vessels at imaging depths greater than 4 cm.ConclusionsThe proposed framework will enable the use of PAT for quantitative and reproducible monitoring of disease progression and treatment response.
Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is a systemic therapy used to treat breast cancer prior to surgery. Multispectral photoacoustic (PA) imaging has been showing promising results in breast cancer. However, in order to use PA imaging in NAC response monitoring registration of the serial PA images is needed. In this study we propose and validate an automatic image registration algorithm to align intra-patient repeated breast PA images that can correct for patient repositioning and local non-rigid tissue deformation. Thanks to this algorithm, PA imaging can prove to be a non-invasive technique capable of monitoring the tumour functionality over time.
To understand the stability of photoacoustic imaging for longitudinal imaging, a repeatability study needs to be performed. In longitudinal imaging, instrumental drifts or other changes over time, are likely to affect images in complex ways. In this study, inter- and intra-day variations of the photoacoustic-ultrasound breast imager are measured with a specially developed test phantom as ground truth. The phantom mimics the breast temperature to be able to measure the coupling medium’s temperature stability and homogeneity in a as realistic as possible setting. Moreover, photoacoustic targets are used to measure the pressure correlated to the pulse-by-pulse laser output energy.
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