Novel Image Optimization Method for Joint Photoacoustic Tomography

The distribution of speed of sound (SOS) in biomedical tissue and delay compensation (DC) have significant impact on the image quality of photoacoustic tomography (PAT). When imaging human peripheral joints, using fixed SOS and DC can only ensure that the reconstructed images are focused in a limited depth range, whereas they are defocused at other depths, which cause severe artifacts and blurring. In this work, a linear-DC based reconstruction approach is proposed to focus the whole PAT image region. It is proved by two in vivo experiments that, compared with traditional delay-and-sum back projection algorithms, the proposed method can effectively optimize the image quality of articular tissues in PAT.