Physics-Aware Neural Operators for Direct Inversion in 3D Photoacoustic Tomography
Learning physics-constrained inverse operators-rather than post-processing physics-based reconstructions-is a broadly applicable strategy for problems with expensive forward models. We demonstrate this principle in three-dimensional photoacoustic computed tomography (3D PACT), where current systems demand dense transducer arrays and prolonged scans, restricting clinical translation. We introduce PANO (PACT imaging neural operator), an end-to-end physics-aware neural operator-a deep learning architecture that generalizes across input sampling densities without retraining-that directly learns the inverse mapping from raw sensor measurements to a 3D volumetric image. Unlike two-step methods that reconstruct then denoise, PANO performs direct inversion in a single pass, jointly embedding physics and data priors. It employs spherical discrete-continuous convolutions to respect hemispherical sensor geometry and Helmholtz equation constraints to ensure physical consistency. PANO reconstructs high-quality images from both simulated and real data across diverse sparse acquisition settings, achieves real-time inference and outperforms the widely-used UBP algorithm by approximately 33 percentage points in cosine similarity on simulated data and 14 percentage points on real phantom data. These results establish a pathway toward more accessible 3D PACT systems for preclinical research, and motivate future in-vivo validation for clinical translation.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
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,…
Photoacoustic Reconstruction Using Sparsity in Curvelet Frame: Image versus Data Domain
Curvelet frame is of special significance for photoacoustic tomography (PAT) due to its sparsifying and microlocalisation properties. We derive a one-to-one map between wavefront directions in image and data spaces in PA…
compressed sensingImage ReconstructionGeneralized Inversion of Nonlinear Operators
Inversion of operators is a fundamental concept in data processing. Inversion of linear operators is well studied, supported by established theory. When an inverse either does not exist or is not unique, generalized inve…
Fast algorithms enabling optimization and deep learning for photoacoustic tomography in a circular detection geometry
The inverse source problem arising in photoacoustic tomography and in several other coupled-physics modalities is frequently solved by iterative algorithms. Such algorithms are based on the minimization of a certain cost…
Image ReconstructionLatent-Space Causal Discovery from Indirect Neuroimaging Observations
Neuroimaging does not observe causal variables directly: hemodynamics and volume conduction distort signals so that statistical dependence need not reflect latent neural influence. Before estimating graphs, one must spec…