Streak artifact suppression in photoacoustic computed tomography using adaptive back projection

Chuangjian Cai; Xuanhao Wang; Ke Si; Jun Qian; Jianwen Luo; Cheng Ma

doi:10.1364/BOE.10.004803

Streak artifact suppression in photoacoustic computed tomography using adaptive back projection

Biomed Opt Express. 2019 Aug 26;10(9):4803-4814. doi: 10.1364/BOE.10.004803. eCollection 2019 Sep 1.

Authors

Chuangjian Cai^{1

2}, Xuanhao Wang^{3

2}, Ke Si^{4

5}, Jun Qian⁴, Jianwen Luo^{1

6}, Cheng Ma^{3

7

8

9}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
² These authors contribute equally.
³ Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
⁵ Center for Neuroscience, Department of Neurobiology, NHC and CAMS Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou 310058, China.
⁶ luo_jianwen@tsinghua.edu.cn.
⁷ Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Beijing 100084, China.
⁸ Beijing Innovation Center for Future Chip, Beijing 100084, China.
⁹ cheng_ma@tsinghua.edu.cn.

Abstract

For photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT), an insufficient number of ultrasound detectors can cause serious streak-type artifacts. These artifacts get overlaid on top of image features, and thus locally jeopardize image quality and resolution. Here, a reconstruction algorithm, termed Contamination-Tracing Back-Projection (CTBP), is proposed for the mitigation of streak-type artifacts. During reconstruction, CTBP adaptively adjusts the back-projection weight, whose value is determined by the likelihood of contamination, to minimize the negative influences of strong absorbers. An iterative solution of the eikonal equation is implemented to accurately trace the time of flight of different pixels. Numerical, phantom and in vivo experiments demonstrate that CTBP can dramatically suppress streak artifacts in PACT and improve image quality.