Improving the quality of optoacoustic imaging: a comparison of physical and numerical experiment

Abstract

Optoacoustic imaging is based on the generation of thermoelastic waves by heating an object in an optically inhomogeneous medium with a short laser pulse. The generated ultrasonic waves contain information about the distribution of structures with predominant optical absorption. Detection of acoustic perturbations on the surface of the object and the application of the backprojection algorithm are used to create a picture of the absorbed energy inside the environment. Conventional reconstruction methods lead to artifacts due to the peculiarities of the recovery algorithm. This study proposes an iterative procedure to reduce these artifacts. The algorithm minimizes the error between the measured signals and the signals calculated from the recovered image. The paper compares the results of processing optoacoustic signals implemented in numerical experiments with the results of physical experiments. It is shown that the quality of the recovered images improves even with a small number of iterations.