A Three-Stage Compressed Sensing Method for Photoacoustic Imaging

To address the issue of low imaging quality in compressed sensing photoacoustic imaging methods under high undersampling, a three-stage compressed sensing method is proposed. This method effectively increases the sampling rate while maintaining the same number of sensors, thereby enhancing reconstruction quality. Initially, in the fully sampled scenario, spatial and temporal operators are created, transforming the target recovery signal from complete photoacoustic data into a signal that is compressed in both spatial and temporal domains through these operators. Random undersampling is then performed in the spatial domain, and the compressed signal is recovered using the observation signal and curvelet domain compressed sensing. Subsequently, the inverse operator is applied to restore the compressed signal to complete photoacoustic data. Finally, traditional photoacoustic reconstruction methods are combined for imaging. Simulation and experimental results indicate that the three-stage compressed sensing photoacoustic imaging method not only retains the low cost and high-speed advantages of the two-stage method but also significantly improves the quality of photoacoustic imaging.