Spatiotemporal Antialiasing in Photoacoustic Computed Tomography.

Abstract

Photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) based on a full-ring ultrasonic transducer array is widely used for small animal wholebody and human organ imaging, thanks to its high in-plane resolution and full-view fidelity. However, spatial aliasing in full-ring geometry PACT has not been studied in detail. If the spatial Nyquist criterion is not met, aliasing in spatial sampling causes artifacts in reconstructed images, even when the temporal Nyquist criterion has been satisfied. In this work, we clarified the source of spatial aliasing through spatiotemporal analysis. We demonstrated that the combination of spatial interpolation and temporal filtering can effectively mitigate artifacts caused by aliasing in either image reconstruction or spatial sampling, and we validated this method by both numerical simulations and in vivo experiments.