Effect of iterative reconstruction integrating SART and FBP on photoacoustic imaging

Abstract

Photoacoustic imaging is a noninvasive biomedical imaging modality for visualizing the internal structure and function of soft tissues. In this paper we present a combined iterative reconstruction algorithm to recover the distribution of optical absorption coefficients. Such a combination of the simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (SART) algorithm and the filtered back projection (FBP) algorithm bears the promise to improve the image quality of fast but not accurate. The different between the present proposal and traditional ART algorithm is that we computer a full error image with FBP, which is used to projection differences between original and reconstruction image, and to update the solution in each iteration step. The combined iterative reconstruction algorithm works well in rectification of the measurement and converges quickly onto an accurate estimate of the distribution of absolute absorption coefficients. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm effectively reduces the artifacts and blurs, and yields better quality of reconstruction image than that with FBP algorithm in terms of both accuracy and robustness to noise.