Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, Volume. 18, Issue 2, 2450023(2025)

Mean-reverting diffusion model-enhanced acoustic-resolution photoacoustic microscopy for resolution enhancement: Toward optical resolution

Yiyang Cao1, Shunfeng Lu1, Cong Wan1, Yiguang Wang2, Xuan Liu2, Kangjun Guo2, Yubin Cao2, Zilong Li2, Qiegen Liu2、*, and Xianlin Song2、**
Author Affiliations
  • 1School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, P. R. China
  • 2School of Information Engineering, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, P. R. China
  • show less

    Acoustic-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (AR-PAM) suffers from degraded lateral resolution due to acoustic diffraction. Here, a resolution enhancement strategy for AR-PAM via a mean-reverting diffusion model was proposed to achieve the transition from acoustic resolution to optical resolution. By modeling the degradation process from high-resolution image to low-resolution AR-PAM image with stable Gaussian noise (i.e., mean state), a mean-reverting diffusion model is trained to learn prior information of the data distribution. Then the learned prior is employed to generate a high-resolution image from the AR-PAM image by iteratively sampling the noisy state. The performance of the proposed method was validated utilizing the simulated and in vivo experimental data under varying lateral resolutions and noise levels. The results show that an over 3.6-fold enhancement in lateral resolution was achieved. The image quality can be effectively improved, with a notable enhancement of ∼66% in PSNR and ∼480% in SSIM for in vivo data.

    Tools

    Get Citation

    Copy Citation Text

    Yiyang Cao, Shunfeng Lu, Cong Wan, Yiguang Wang, Xuan Liu, Kangjun Guo, Yubin Cao, Zilong Li, Qiegen Liu, Xianlin Song. Mean-reverting diffusion model-enhanced acoustic-resolution photoacoustic microscopy for resolution enhancement: Toward optical resolution[J]. Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, 2025, 18(2): 2450023

    Download Citation

    EndNote(RIS)BibTexPlain Text
    Save article for my favorites
    Paper Information

    Category: Research Articles

    Received: Jun. 7, 2024

    Accepted: Aug. 6, 2024

    Published Online: Apr. 7, 2025

    The Author Email: Qiegen Liu (liuqiegen@ncu.edu.cn), Xianlin Song (songxianlin@ncu.edu.cn)

    DOI:10.1142/S1793545824500238

    Topics