Ultrasound localized microscopy-based spatial prior for photoacoustic reconstruction with a linear transducer array

Abstract

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) reconstruction with linear transducer arrays suffers from limited view artifacts, which impairs the reconstruction accuracy. Here, we introduce a modified Tikhonov regularization method to include vascular map obtained by Ultrasound localized microscopy (ULM) as a spatial prior in PAT reconstruction. We suggest an approach based on L-curve and Pearson correlation map to guide the selection of optimal regularization parameters. Simulation results suggest that spatial prior-based Tikhonov regularization can effectively address the limited view artifacts of PAT reconstruction with linear transducer arrays, paving the way of integrating PAT with ULM to enhance reconstruction accuracy in limited-view PAT.