Fig. 3.

Scheme of new signal-oriented analysis. The biomarker ICG was injected shortly after the start of the MSOT image acquisition, and the collected time-resolved MSOT image stacks were spectrally unmixed into four channels (water, ICG, deoxygenated haemoglobin and oxygenated haemoglobin). ROIs were derived with a DL-based approach and are denoted as animal-ROIs (yellow outline). The image stacks were then pre-processed, and the primary signal kinetics present in the ICG channel were extracted by k-means clustering on the pixel level. The obtained pharmacokinetics were then used to compare treatment groups quantitatively. Additionally, the biodistribution of the extracted signal kinetics were reconstructed and visualised per animal.