Novel optimization method for multi-dimensional breast photoacoustic tomography

Abstract

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is an effective optical biomedical imaging method which is characterized with noninonizing and noninvasive, presenting good soft tissue contrast with excellent spatial resolution. To build a multi-dimensional breast PAT image, more ultrasound sensors are needed, which brings difficulties to data acquisition. The time complexity for multi-dimensional breast PAT image reconstruction also rises tremendously. Compressive sensing (CS) theory breaks the restriction of Nyquist sampling theorem and is capable to rebuild signals with fewer measurements. In this contribution, we propose an effective optimization method for multi-dimensional breast PAT, which combines the theory of CS and an unevenly, adaptively distributing data acquisition algorithm. With this method, the quality of our reconstructed breast PAT images are better than those using existing multi-dimensional breast PAT system. To build breast PAT images with the same quality, the required number of ultrasound transducers is decreased by using our proposed method. We have verified our method on simulation data and achieved expected results in both two dimensional and three dimensional PAT image reconstruction. In the future, our method can be applied to various aspects of biomedical PAT imaging such as early stage tumor detection and in vivo imaging monitoring.