Spatial resolution and contrast enhancement in photoacoustic imaging with filter delay multiply and sum beamforming technique

Photoacoustic imaging is used to differentiate between tissue types based on light absorption. Different structures, such as vascular density of capillaries in human tissue, can be analysed and provide diagnostic information to detect early stage breast cancer. Delay and sum (DAS) beamforming is the traditional method to reconstruct photoacoustic images. However, for structures located deep in the tissue (>10 mm), signal to noise (SNR) of the photoacoustic signal drops significantly. This study proposes using filter delay multiply and sum (FDMAS) beamforming technique to increase the SNR and enhance the image quality. Experimental results showed that FDMAS beamformer improved the SNR by 6.9 dB and the lateral resolution by 48% compared to the DAS beamformer. Moreover, the effect of aperture size on the proposed method is presented as the sub-group FDMAS, which further increased the improvement in image quality.