Performance comparison of acoustic lens based photoacoustic image reconstruction with algorithm based reconstruction techniques

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the performance of an acoustic lens based reconstruction technique with the conventional back projection algorithm based reconstruction technique used for photoacoustic (PA) imaging. The acoustic lens based reconstruction technique considered in this study used an acoustic lens to create an image of the PA source on the ultrasound (US) transducer array and thus it could produce 2D reconstructed images which represent entire cross sectional planes of the object in real time. This technique could potentially reduce the number of acquisitions significantly from which was required in the case of reconstruction using a conventional algorithm based reconstruction technique. This is a hardware reconstruction technique eliminating the need for heavy computational and memory requirements in algorithm based PA image reconstructions. A linear and a planar US transducer array were used in this study to acquire data from a spherical or a cylindrical point source. Three metrics full width half maximum (FWHM), Pearson Correlation (PC), and energy (E) were used to evaluate the performance of each reconstruction technique. The results of this study showed that the acoustic lens based reconstruction technique is capable to reconstruct 2D PA images with qualities comparable to that of the algorithm based reconstruction techniques.