Optical Inversion and Spectral Unmixing of Spectroscopic Photoacoustic Images with Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Accurate estimation of the relative concentrations of chromophores in a spectroscopic photoacoustic (sPA) image can reveal immense structural, functional, and molecular information about physiological processes. However, due to nonlinearities and ill-posedness inherent to sPA imaging, concentration estimation is intractable. The Spectroscopic Photoacoustic Optical Inversion Autoencoder (SPOI-AE) aims to address the sPA optical inversion and spectral unmixing problems without assuming linearity. Herein, SPOI-AE was trained and tested on \textit{in vivo} mouse lymph node sPA images with unknown ground truth chromophore concentrations. SPOI-AE better reconstructs input sPA pixels than conventional algorithms while providing biologically coherent estimates for optical parameters, chromophore concentrations, and the percent oxygen saturation of tissue. SPOI-AE's unmixing accuracy was validated using a simulated mouse lymph node phantom ground truth.