Implementation and Comparison of Three Image Reconstruction Algorithms in FPGA Toward Palm-Size Photoacoustic Tomography

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging has been widely applied in both preclinical and clinical applications. With a significantly increasing number of data acquisition channels, fast high-quality image reconstruction with low cost for PA imaging is an open challenge. In this article, we propose a palm-size PA tomography (PAT) system, named palmPAT, to achieve miniaturized low-cost PA imaging modality with high performance. To prove the feasibility, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of PA image reconstruction is performed to achieve high-quality imaging performance with miniaturized size and cost. This FPGA implementation can be easily adapted to widely used algorithms, such as delay-and-sum (DAS) and its variants [e.g., delay-multiply-and-sum (DMAS), DAS-coherence factor (CF)]. We have performed in vivo human finger experiments to demonstrate the feasibility and potential. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study concentrated on the implementation and comparison of three frequently used PA image reconstruction algorithms based on FPGA platform.