Image improvement in linear-array photoacoustic imaging using high resolution coherence factor weighting technique

Moein Mozaffarzadeh; Bahador Makkiabadi; Maryam Basij; Mohammad Mehrmohammadi

doi:10.1186/s42490-019-0009-9

Image improvement in linear-array photoacoustic imaging using high resolution coherence factor weighting technique

BMC Biomed Eng. 2019 Apr 5:1:10. doi: 10.1186/s42490-019-0009-9. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Moein Mozaffarzadeh^{1

2}, Bahador Makkiabadi^{1

3}, Maryam Basij⁴, Mohammad Mehrmohammadi⁴

Affiliations

¹ Research Center for Biomedical Technologies and Robotics, Institute for Advanced Medical Technologies, Tehran, Iran.
² Department of Imaging Physics, Laboratory of Acoustical Wavefield Imaging, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands.
³ Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
⁴ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan USA.

Abstract

Background: In Photoacoustic imaging (PAI), the most prevalent beamforming algorithm is delay-and-sum (DAS) due to its simple implementation. However, it results in a low quality image affected by the high level of sidelobes. Coherence factor (CF) can be used to address the sidelobes in the reconstructed images by DAS, but the resolution improvement is not good enough, compared to the high resolution beamformers such as minimum variance (MV). In this paper, it is proposed to use high-resolution-CF (HRCF) weighting technique in which MV is used instead of the existing DAS in the formula of the conventional CF.

Results: The higher performance of HRCF is proved numerically and experimentally. The quantitative results obtained with the simulations show that at the depth of 40 mm, in comparison with DAS+CF and MV+CF, HRCF improves the full-width-half-maximum of about 91% and 15% and the signal-to-noise ratio about 40% and 14%, respectively.

Conclusion: Proposed method provides a high resolution along with a low level of sidelobes for PAI.

Keywords: Linear-array tomography; Photoacoustic imaging; Resolution improvement.