Deconvolution reconstruction of full-view and limited-view photoacoustic tomography: a simulation study

Although many algorithms are available for full-view photoacoustic tomography (PAT), no exact and stable algorithm for limited-view PAT has been proposed. In this paper the deconvolution reconstruction (DR) algorithm is proposed for both full-view and limited-view PAT. In the DR algorithm, first a new function is constructed from detected photoacoustic signals and approximately simplified, and then the tissue's electromagnetic absorption is derived from this function on the basis of Fourier-based deconvolution. Computer simulations are carried out to compare the DR algorithm with two popular PAT algorithms, the time-domain reconstruction (TDR) and the filtered back projection (FBP). Although the error of the DR algorithm increases with the size of the detected object, it is shown that the DR algorithm has good precision and strong robustness to noise in the full-view PAT, nearly equivalent to the TDR and FBP. Yet the DR algorithm is more than ten times faster in computation speed. In the limited-view PAT, the DR is superior to the TDR and FBP in terms of both accuracy and robustness to noise. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America