Artifact Removal Factor for Circular-view Photoacoustic Tomography

Reducing the number of acoustic detectors in a circular-view photoacoustic imaging system leads to cost reduction and increased efficiency. But reducing the number of acoustic detectors results in appearing more streak artifacts in the reconstructed image. In this paper to suppress artifacts, we proposed an artifact removal factor. The proposed factor is a combination of an edge detection image filter and a standard deviation filter that is applied to the back-projected signals. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we reduced the number of transducers to a fifth of the minimum required number. Numerical results have shown that the generalized contrast to noise ratio (gCNR) reaches 0.85 in the proposed method. Also, the degradation of the gCNR is not significant by reducing the number of acoustic detectors from 1200 to 240. Moreover, the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) values reach 0.91 and 0.94 for 1200 and 240 acoustic detectors, respectively, which is more than ~100%improvement compared to the conventional method.