BCARS Simulated Phantom Dataset for Evaluation of Processing Pipelines

Abstract

Broadband coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (BCARS) microscopy is a powerful label-free biological imaging technique, but the raw signal requires careful processing. The vibrationally resonant (Raman) fingerprint signal is usually small compared with instrumental noise sources and the nonresonant background (NRB) inherent in the BCARS signal. Fortunately, the NRB exhibits a systematic phase relationship with the coherent Raman response, acting as a heterodyne amplifier for the weak fingerprint signal. Due to this heterodyne effect, the Raman response can be recovered quantitatively and invariantly across different instruments, provided the NRB shape is known. Even with heterodyne amplification, the amplitudes of fingerprint signal components are often comparable to system noise. Singular value decomposition (SVD), which utilizes spatial information, is often employed for additional noise filtering. Consequently, finding optimal processing parameters to properly distinguish the NRB and Raman responses and suppress noise in the complex BCARS signal requires a reference system that realistically represents the spectral and spatial properties of BCARS signals obtained from biological samples. We present a digital tissue phantom that meets these criteria as a tool for testing candidate signal processing pipelines. The digital phantom is generated with simulated hyperspectral Raman images having system-specific noise and background characteristics. Here, we analyze phantom datasets with differing background and signal-to-noise conditions to evaluate their impact on the performance of multiple signal processing pipelines. Specifically, we investigate the application of a Butterworth filter-based routine to directly estimate the NRB from the BCARS signal. Additionally, we evaluate a Lorentzian wavelet transform as an alternative to the Hilbert transform for extracting the Raman spectrum from the BCARS signal. While we demonstrate this phantom for BCARS, it can be used for any spectroscopic Raman imaging approach.