A CANDLE for a deeper in vivo insight.

Pierrick Coupé (1, 2) , Martin Munz (1) , Jose V Manjón (3) , Edward S Ruthazer (1) , D. Louis Collins (1)

1 MNI - McConnell Brain Imaging Centre
2 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
3 ITACA

A new Collaborative Approach for eNhanced Denoising under Low-light Excitation (CANDLE) is introduced for the processing of 3D laser scanning multiphoton microscopy images. CANDLE is designed to be robust for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions typically encountered when imaging deep in scattering biological specimens. Based on an optimized non-local means filter involving the comparison of filtered patches, CANDLE locally adapts the amount of smoothing in order to deal with the noise inhomogeneity inherent to laser scanning fluorescence microscopy images. An extensive validation on synthetic data, images acquired on microspheres and in vivo images is presented. These experiments show that the CANDLE filter obtained competitive results compared to a state-of-the-art method and a locally adaptive optimized non-local means filter, especially under low SNR conditions (PSNR<8dB). Finally, the deeper imaging capabilities enabled by the proposed filter are demonstrated on deep tissue in vivo images of neurons and fine axonal processes in the Xenopus tadpole brain.

Mots clés: nonlocal means; multiphoton image; denoising; filtering

Domaines: Analyse numérique [cs.NA]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Imagerie médicale; Ingénierie biomédicale

Pierrick Coupé, Martin Munz, Jose V Manjón, Edward S Ruthazer, D. Louis Collins. A CANDLE for a deeper in vivo insight.. Medical Image Analysis, 2012, 16 (4), pp.849-64. ⟨10.1016/j.media.2012.01.002⟩. ⟨hal-00676241⟩