AbstractIn vivo optical imaging is a fast growing field that offers great perspectives for biomedical applications. In particular, imaging in the shortwave infrared window (SWIR: 1000-1700 nm) represents major improvement compared to the NIR-I region (700-900 nm) in terms of temporal and spatial resolutions in depths down to 4 mm. SWIR is a fast and cheap alternative to more precise methods such as X-ray and opto-acoustic imaging. Main obstacles in SWIR imaging are the noise and scattering from tissues and skin that reduce the precision of the method. We demonstrate the combination of SWIR in vivo imaging in the NIR-IIb region (1500-1700 nm) with advanced deep learning image analysis allows to overcome these obstacles and making a large step forward to high resolution imaging: it allows to precisely segment vessels from tissues and noise, provides morphological structure of the vessels network, with learned pseudo-3D shape, their relative position, dynamic information of blood vascularization in depth in small animals and distinguish the vessels types: artieries and veins. For demonstration we use neural the network IterNet that exploits structural redundancy of the blood vessels (L. Li, et.al., The IEEE WACV, 2020), which provides a useful analysis tool for raw SWIR images.
Fluorescent Gold Nanoclusters for In Vivo Shortwave-Infrared Imaging