Significance: The proposed binary tomography approach was able to recover the vasculature structures accurately, which could potentially enable the utilization of binary tomography algorithm in scenarios such as therapy monitoring and hemorrhage detection in different organs. Aim: Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) involves reconstruction of vascular networks having direct implications in cancer research, cardiovascular studies, and neuroimaging. Various methods have been proposed for recovering vascular networks in photoacoustic imaging; however, most methods are two-step (image reconstruction and image segmentation) in nature. We propose a binary PAT approach wherein direct reconstruction of vascular network from the acquired photoacoustic sinogram data is plausible. Approach: Binary tomography approach relies on solving a dual-optimization problem to reconstruct images with every pixel resulting in a binary outcome (i.e., either background or the absorber). Further, the binary tomography approach was compared against backprojection, Tikhonov regularization, and sparse recovery-based schemes. Results: Numerical simulations, physical phantom experiment, and in-vivo rat brain vasculature data were used to compare the performance of different algorithms. The results indicate that the binary tomography approach improved the vasculature recovery by 10% using in-silico data with respect to the Dice similarity coefficient against the other reconstruction methods. Conclusion: The proposed algorithm demonstrates superior vasculature recovery with limited data both visually and based on quantitative image metrics.

中文翻译：

---

用于改善脉管系统成像的二元光声断层扫描

意义：所提出的二进制断层扫描方法能够准确地恢复脉管系统结构，这有可能使二进制断层扫描算法在不同器官的治疗监测和出血检测等场景中得到利用。目标：光声断层扫描 (PAT) 涉及血管网络的重建，对癌症研究、心血管研究和神经成像具有直接影响。已经提出了各种方法来恢复光声成像中的血管网络。然而，大多数方法本质上是两步（图像重建和图像分割）。我们提出了一种二元 PAT 方法，其中从获得的光声正弦图数据直接重建血管网络是合理的。方法：二元断层扫描方法依赖于解决双重优化问题来重建图像，每个像素都会产生二元结果（即背景或吸收体）。此外，将二进制断层扫描方法与反投影、Tikhonov 正则化和基于稀疏恢复的方案进行了比较。结果：数值模拟、物理模型实验和体内大鼠脑血管数据被用来比较不同算法的性能。结果表明，相对于其他重建方法，二元断层扫描方法使用计算机内数据将 Dice 相似系数的脉管系统恢复提高了 10%。结论：所提出的算法在视觉上和基于定量图像度量的有限数据下展示了卓越的脉管系统恢复。