A Combined Reconstruction Algorithm for Limited-View Multi-Element Photoacoustic Imaging

We present a photoacoustic imaging system with a linear transducer array scanning in limited-view fields and develop a combined reconstruction algorithm, which is a combination of the limited-field filtered back projection (LFBP) algorithm and the simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT) algorithm, to reconstruct the optical absorption distribution. In this algorithm, the LFBP algorithm is exploited to reconstruct the original photoacoustic image, and then the SIRT algorithm is used to improve the quality of the final reconstructed photoacoustic image. Numerical simulations with calculated incomplete data validate the reliability of this algorithm and the reconstructed experimental results further demonstrate that the combined reconstruction algorithm effectively reduces the artifacts and blurs and yields better quality of reconstruction image than that with the LFBP algorithm.