In this work, we present quantitative stiffness and strain reconstruction results from jointly acquired optical coherence (OCT) and photoacoustic (PAT) data for elastography. We refer to this novel imaging modality as optical coherence photoacoustic elastography (OCPE). We develop a multi-layered hybrid inversion algorithm for OCPE, which leverages dual-modality absorption-scattering inputs to quantitatively estimate mechanical properties of the sample. The proposed reconstruction algorithm is adapted to the key features of OCT and PAT by first extracting their complementary information layers from the imaging data and then fusing them by solving the prior-regularized inverse problems.
This is joint work with Lisa Krainz (Medical University of Vienna), Simon Hubmer (Johannes Kepler University Linz), Wolfgang Drexler (Medical University of Vienna) and Otmar Scherzer (University of Vienna, Johann Radon Institute Linz).