RCMDD: A Denoising Architecture for Improved Recovery of Reflectance Confocal Microscopy Images of Skin from Compressive Samples

The Compressive Sensing (CS) framework has demonstrated improved acquisition efficiency on a variety of clinical applications. Of interest to this work is Reflectance Confocal Microscopy (RCM), where CS can influence a drastic reduction in instrumentation complexity and image acquisition times. However, CS introduces the disadvantage of requiring a time consuming and computationally intensive process for image recovery. To mitigate this, the current document details our preliminary work on expanding a Deep-Learning architecture for the acquisition and fast recovery of RCM images using CS. We show preliminary recoveries of RCM images of both a synthetic target and heterogeneous skin tissue using a state-of-the-art network architecture from compressive measurements at various undersampling rates. In addition, we propose an application-specific addition to an established network architecture, and evaluate its ability to further increase the accuracy of recovered CS RCM images and remove visual artifacts. Our initial results show that it is possible to recover compressively sampled images at near-real time rates with comparable quality to established computationally intensive and time-consuming optimization-based methods common in CS applications.