Motion Estimation and Correction in Photoacoustic Tomographic Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid model for photoacoustic tomography that accounts for motion during imaging, providing a method to estimate and correct motion artifacts to improve image quality.

Contribution

It develops a hybrid continuous-discrete model for motion correction in PAT and proposes an automatic method for simultaneous motion estimation and image reconstruction.

Findings

Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The model achieves uniqueness results for simple motion models.

The approach successfully reduces motion artifacts in reconstructed images.

Abstract

Motion, e.g., due to patient movement or improper device calibration, is inevitable in many imaging modalities such as photoacoustic tomography (PAT) by a rotating system and can lead to undesirable motion artifacts in image reconstructions, if ignored. In this paper, we establish a hybrid-type model for PAT that incorporates motion in the model. We first introduce an approximate continuous model and establish two uniqueness results for simple parameterized motion models. Then we formulate the discrete problem of simultaneous motion estimation and image reconstruction as a separable nonlinear least squares problem and describe an automatic approach to detect and eliminate motion artifacts during the reconstruction process. Numerical examples validate our methods.