High-contrast imaging based on wavefront shaping to improve low signal-to-noise ratio photoacoustic signals using superpixel method*

Abstract

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging has drawn tremendous research interest for various applications in biomedicine and experienced exponential growth over the past decade. Since the scattering effect of biological tissue on ultrasound is two- to three-orders magnitude weaker than that of light, photoacoustic imaging can effectively improve the imaging depth. However, as the depth of imaging further increases, the incident light is seriously affected by scattering that the generated photoacoustic signal is very weak and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is quite low. Low SNR signals can reduce imaging quality and even cause imaging failure. In this paper, we proposed a new wavefront shaping and imaging method of low SNR photoacoustic signal using digital micromirror device (DMD) based superpixel method. We combined the superpixel method with DMD to modulate the phase and amplitude of the incident light, and the genetic algorithm (GA) was used as the wavefront shaping algorithm. The enhancement of the photoacoustic signal reached 10.46. Then we performed scanning imaging by moving the absorber with the translation stage. A clear image with contrast of 8.57 was obtained while imaging with original photoacoustic signals could not be achieved. The proposed method opens new perspectives for imaging with weak photoacoustic signals.