Improving Axial Resolution of Optical Resolution Photoacoustic Microscopy with Advanced Frequency Domain Eigenspace Based Minimum Variance Beamforming Method

Optical resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) leverages optical focusing and acoustic detection for microscopic optical absorption imaging. Intrinsically it owns high optical lateral resolution and poor acoustic axial resolution. Such anisometric resolution hinders good 3-D visualization; thus 2-D maximum amplitude projection images are commonly presented in the literature. Since its axial resolution is limited by the bandwidth of acoustic detectors, ultrahigh frequency, and wideband detectors with Wiener deconvolution have been proposed to address this issue. Nonetheless, they also introduce other issues such as severe high-frequency attenuation and limited imaging depth. In this work, we view axial resolution improvement as an axial signal reconstruction problem, and the axial resolution degradation is caused by axial sidelobe interference. We propose an advanced frequency-domain eigenspace-based minimum variance (F-EIBMV) beamforming technique to suppress axial sidelobe interference and noises. This method can simultaneously enhance the axial resolution and contrast of OR-PAM. For a 25-MHz OR-PAM system, the full-width at half-maximum of an axial point spread function decreased significantly from 69.3 µm to 16.89 µm, indicating a significant improvement in axial resolution.