Adapted Coherent Weighting in Photoacoustic Tomography

In this paper, we proposed an adapted coherent factor (ACF), which is applied to a circular scanning photoacoustic computed tomography (C-PACT) arrangement. For validation, ACF is applied to different reconstruction algorithms such as universal-back projection (UBP) and adapted delay and sum (ADAS) with two types of SNR levels (80 dB and 20 dB) and 2 types of detectors with different bandwidths (infinite bandwidth and 2.25 MHz central frequency, 70% bandwidth). Simulation results indicate ACF can improve the Full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the imaging system point-spread function (PSF) and contrast ratio (CR) by 16% - 20% and 13.68-30.24 dB, respectively. These quantitative values are different due to the different reconstruction algorithms, SNR levels and detector bandwidth.