Coherent Compounding for Photoacoustic Tomography

Circular-view detector configurations provide higher image quality in a photoacoustic (PA) imaging system than other configurations. The image quality degrades, and streak artifacts appear in the reconstructed image as the number of detectors decreases. Here, we present a coherent compounding strategy for suppressing streak artifacts. Parts of the reconstructed image that refer to the excited PA absorbers and the artifact are separable by reconstructing several sub-images and combining the reconstructed images. The numerical results showed that the presented method suppresses artifacts and improves the quality of reconstructed images than the conventional method. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) of the presented method reaches 43 dB and 0.73, respectively, which results, in a 13 dB and 2.5-fold improvement of the PSNR and SSIM, respectively, compared to the conventional method.