Reconstruction of Photoacoustic Tomography Inside a Scattering Layer Using a Matrix Filtering Method

Photoacoustic (PA) tomography (PAT) has potential for use in brain imaging due to its rich optical contrast, high acoustic resolution in deep tissue, and good biosafety. However, the skull often poses challenges for transcranial brain imaging. The skull can cause severe distortion and attenuation of the phase and amplitude of PA waves, which leads to poor resolution, low contrast, and strong noise in the images. In this study, we propose an image reconstruction method to recover the PA image insider a skull-like scattering layer. This method reduces the scattering artifacts by combining a correlation matrix filter and a time reversal operator. Both numerical simulations and PA imaging experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively improves the image quality with less speckle noise and better signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method may improve the quality of PAT in a complex acoustic scattering environment, such as transcranial brain imaging.